His Ardor: A Meitantei Holmes Fanfiction, Part 6
by AmberPalette
Summary: Continuing the case against Jack the Ripper, in which Holmes and Moriarty are forced to pool their resources in the interest of protecting the women for whom they care: realizing in the duration that these underestimated women, Irene Adler and Marie Hudso


His Ardor: Part 6

A Sherlock Hound/Meitantei Holmes Fanfiction

By Amber C.S. ("ProfessorA")

**Author's note: **

**_This work is a hodgepodge of various canonical and alternate universe sources:_**** The Sherlock Holmes mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (most specifically "The Sign of Four," "A Study In Scarlet," "A Scandal In Bohemia," and "The Final Problem"), the Basil Rathbone film "Terror By Night," the Hayao Miyazaki television series "Sherlock Hound," the Hallmark/Artisan Entertainment Sherlock Holmes miniseries, and especially the Steven Spielberg film "Young Sherlock Holmes."**

****

**Some details of various aspects of the Jack the Ripper suspects, such as the Chi-Ro theory, are loosely inspired by the novels Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge, by the great Irene Adler pastiche author, Carole Nelson Douglas.**

**The character "Lola" and the Blue Raven Tavern are creations of webmaster and fan author "HoBS" and are used with permission. **

**All characters aside the historically infamous figure "Jack the Ripper" and my fancharacter "Katherine Farrell" (who is copyrighted to ME) are copyright Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; in the case of Dr. Waxflatter, Elizabeth Hardy, and the Rhamme Tep, Steven Spielberg; or, in the case of Polly, Todd and Smiley, Hayao Miyazaki. I do NOT own any of them. **

"To him who in the love of Nature holds 

_Communion with her invisible forms, she_

_Speaks_

_A various language; for his gayer hours_

_She has a voice of gladness, and a smile_

_And eloquence of beauty, and she glides_

_Into his darker musings, with a mild _

_And healing sympathy, that steals away _

_Their sharpness, ere he is aware."_

_--William Cullen Bryant_

Whitechapel is a writhing mass of streets, alleys, inter-alleys, and intra-alleys. By day, it is merely gray, grimey, unseemly. But by night, it is the outermost skin of Hell's face, harboring fiddle-scratching Gypsies and their raw hard liquors. Harboring Russian Jews cruelly vomited up out of their homeland by religious hatred, displaced and despondent and struggling to start anew in the face of fresh antisemitism. Harboring similarly nomadic, and rag-clad, spirits of all skin tones, lurching aimlessly with their bottles, too dazed to recall their pasts and too lost to pursue any future. Harboring children to whom nothing is warmer or stabler than an opium den, and destitute old widows with such gout and sores beneath their stained flannel shawls that they pray for the morning when they simply will not awaken. Harboring women so hungry for necessity that they forfeit reputation and bare all their cleavage and all their secret selves to earn half the standard wage. Harboring the monsters with mutilated consciences that allow—nay, demand—that the convenient ignorance of the "righteous" West Enders be taken advantage of, and every other East End resident be preyed upon. Whitechapel festers.

The Gentleman Criminal that stumbles down this street wonders, then, why he is here. True, he is a nomad: This earth upon which he trods—this mist-drenched cobblestone graced by occasional piles of steaming horse manure—this earth that causes many a man of his station to burst into a heartfelt rendition of "Hail, Britannia"— is not his native soil. Or rather, his native arid sand.

So the Gentleman Criminal can understand the heart of the roving Whitechapel Gypsy. He is not nearly so disconcerted by the screeching catgut and horsehair instruments as other accidental visitors to the district—other men as dapperly clad as he, in deceptively dove-white tophat, waistcoat, trousers, and red silk-underbellied cloak. White concealing red. The perfect shades for a dangerous hypocrite. And a hypocrite he had been, above all else, since barely upon the brink of 21 years: Since assuming an alias in order to safely expose himself and his mathematical genius to Oxford University.

Since he left Ireland, home of Daddy Dearest—or was it Daddy Disreputable?—and came to England, that is. England, which would accept his mother's Egyptian surname with even less warmth than his father's tarnished name. So he spelled the name his mother gave him backwards and they all assumed he was one of them, and celebrated him as a home-grown genius: thus his first dishonest act in the Kingdom.

Hail, Britannia.

Creator of hypocrites of necessity.

But The Gentleman Criminal is past petty grudges now. Isn't he? Well, of course. _She_ has shown him a better way. _She_ is the closest he will ever get to understanding the will and the compassion of whatever God might still tolerate his veneration. If God is willing to give this once-pagan a second chance, and that manifested in the arms of so fair and bright and loving a creature as _Her_, well, then, The Gentleman is _not_ inclined to argue. Even the Hated Meddler, Sherlock Holmes, will attest to the fact that the Gentleman does not have _that _much hubris.

So the Gentleman will at least no longer grit his teeth when his half-countrymen blubber as the gilt Royal Carriage bearing Victoria and her descendents—the likes of the fat and weak bully Prince "Bertie"—passes. And yes, may that same Forgiving God help him: The Gentleman will try not roll his eyes when the Royal Guard marches down the street braying, "God save the Queen!"

He has been busy, though, running errands unrelated to assisting the Meddler in catching Jack the Ripper. So engrossed has Holmes been in his latest lurid puzzle (Holmes always was more myopic than his once- mentor, like a microscope on legs that never absorbed the bigger picture) that the detective had opened the door to all other criminal activities without his usual Grade-A Meddling. It has enabled the Gentleman to make some rounds about the National Bank, filching and tapping into accounts of various nondescript—and, no doubt, now disgruntled—London gents.

Presently the Gentleman pats a fat sack of stolen sovereigns in his belt and chuckles low in his throat, a sound lost in the hurly-burly of the Whitechapel evening.

It is quickly muffled by a sobering thought: Has the wily act of dishonesty been worth leaving _Her _for a few hours: just to pick up this little trove? And will it be worth _Her_ scorn?

Once, perhaps, it would have been.

But not now. Something sharp in his chest—guilt piercing his heart. It is disconcerting. The sack of loot clutched in his greedy, spiderly fingers grows heavier. He cannot endure the weight. Perhaps it is not too late to return it . . .

_What's this?  
_ Something snags the falcon gaze of The Gentleman Criminal.

A child. A crying child—a boy. One of the Gypsies, by his dusty brown complexion and the rows of gold earrings decking his ears and framing his deep dark eyes. He is wandering in a red silk shift—yes, the same red, the same material as The Gentleman's undercloak—about a waning campfire. There is another figure in the alley—labored breathing. Covered in black rags—a woman in great pain.

She moans, and in synchronization, the Gypsy boy weeps. Wringing his hands. Lost. Such a Mesmerising sway of their heads. Like King Cobras—no, more harmless, more like palm leaves. Like palm leaves in a sandstorm.

And oh, how it takes the Gentleman Criminal back. Back across the oceans and sands separating him from his birthplace. He is astonished to feel wetness welling in his eyes, obscuring his vision.

"Help me, sir!" the Gypsy boy cries, pointing at the woman in the alley. He speaks in a broken ring of Romany and English, but it is still discernible enough to catch the gist: "Help me, mother is sick! Mother is hurting! _Help_ me!"

"_Help, officer. Please, sir, take off your redcoat. Why won't you help, officer? Mother is hurting! She is burned! Can't you hear me? Stop spitting on me, I have British blood in me too! Please, sir, mother is hurting. Sir, don't hurt me." _

The closeness of the hut. After the massacre, after the desecration. The stench of burned fur and flesh. White faces, evening suits and taffeta gowns swishing in the dust, as the Righteous English Imperialists rush past. Ignoring the boy—desperately ignoring him.

_ Ignoring him had been the _best_ of it. Not a one of those damned British entrepreneurs and officers that floated in and out of Egypt would help him to get his mother to the hospital in Cairo. They had their way with her ill, fallen form, so perverse were their lusts, and they enjoyed harassing him, as well—"How fun to harass a harmless, frightened child! Haha, let's throw some pebbles at him! Sixpence if you can hit him between his little eyes! Half a crown if you get his hindside!"_

_But _help_ them—him, and his mother? Never. So his mother lay in misery for the time that preceded his Irish father's return, the final massacre of his village, and his own orphanage at last. _

The Gentleman Criminal shudders off the uninvited memory. He peers closely at the writhing gypsy woman and her terrified son. They are both so thin—except for a telltale bulge in the woman's belly. She is clutching it, and crying out to her God between moans. She is in labor.

His hand falls on the money pouch in his belt.

Help.

_He was taken to County Kerry, Ireland, after the last village fire. Numb to the bone. Spending time with his prune-faced grandparents—knowing the true meaning of a life devoid of compassion. Only the burning flesh smell lingered from the two massacres that his mother suffered at the hands of the British. Burning flesh, God, her body on fire was almost tangible; perhaps he took up the hobby of Botany in order to be able to manufacture fragrant plants that dulled the smell . . . Yet all other memories, or emotional impressions, seemed lost to him. A vitriolic hatred and a gloom lingered, but even these were coldly controlled, and he was vaguely aware, in his green, young mind, that keeping emotions bottled up is the Supreme Secret to Absolute Power and Success. Perhaps this was why Grandfather and Grandmother were so distant with him before they died, and he was shipped to his late father's estate, Heaven's Gate, in Scotland, where he made a modicum of a normal life with his older and younger half-brothers. Perhaps they really DID love him, and just wanted to teach him something. Perhaps that was why Grandfather, who loved the bottle more than he loved Grandmother, substituted belt-whippings on his bare back, and other . . . other treatments . . . why Grandmother forbade him meals for days on end as punishment for mischief. . . why they substituted these things for affection._

_ But that, in the end, did not really _help_ him._

_ He could not remember when he had cried out for help and really been answered._

Suddenly The Gentleman Criminal cannot stop himself.

He never got help, but he can _give _it now. It will be as if he has finally obtained justice for himself.

He offers the newly-stuffed wallet to the boy and his anguished mother.

He hesitates.

Sebastian will be angry, and will raise a row. Sebastian is so hard to manage when he is angry—so irritating. Sebastian hates imprudent acts of kindness . . .

Oh, to _hell_ with Sebastian. He is _always_ angry, _always_ a handful. And this street urchin is desperate. But no more.

After all, _She_ might even praise him for this.

Firmly, now, he places the wallet in the child's dirt-stained fingers. He hears himself speaking, his voice a strained rasp. "Use this for cab fare. Go to 221 B Baker Street and ask for the retired doctor named John Watson. Bring him here and bid him help your mother to hospital. Pay the fees for a midwife with what you have left. Go on, now, lad, quickly."

He tries to leave them there. He will explain Watson's spontaneous visitor to the Meddler's bumbling boarding house mate later. Watson is a good man, despite his clumsy ways, and of sound wits; he will help, there is no doubt.

"Thank you, sir," the boy wails, flinging his filthy little arms around The Gentleman Criminal's trouser legs. Sullying them. Funny how an act of kindness can strip away every hypocrite's façade.

But the Gentleman Criminal stiffens. He does not want to be touched.

He wishes he could have known the comfort the child knows. The thought of it, of that of which he has always been deprived, is excruciating. How can he know that _She _will not be sullied, too, as he has been by this child's arms, when _She_ at last serves as his comforter?

How clearly he remembers his own voice, begging through tears, a boy barefoot and abandoned on Egyptian sand: _"Please, officer, don't hurt me."_

Now comes a subsequent imploration of himself: _Don't hurt _Her_ as _you've_ been hurt_.

But was he capable of sparing _Her_? Or would he thwart his own good intentions . . .?

The mother moans again, wrenching the Gentleman Criminal back into the present.

"Please let go of me," Professor James Moriarty whimpers, his voice thin and shuddering. He disentangles himself from the Gypsy boy, from his pain, and tears down the street, thus relieved of his fortunes.

Why not, then, of his _guilt_?

A solution at last manifests itself in his bewildered mind. ". . . I need to go talk to Lola."

It is said that when change rattles the core of a living soul, that soul finds comfort only in returning to the most primary environs of existence—the places that time touches in only small, impotent washes. The haven of childhood, or at least of youth. Sometimes it is sameness, familiarity, that is preferred even to a change that is profoundly good—more than even salvation. More than even nirvana. Such is the evidence of a mortal's smallness in the grand scheme.

Perhaps that was why James Moriarty found himself, in the wake of the most strenuous mental puzzle of his career, and basking in the favor of a woman he'd have gladly bowed down and worshiped, instead drifting far from Baker Street, and the scene of Marie Hudson's ultimate romantic pledges. He excused himself from her parlor and from her boarding house with a kiss to her hand, simultaneously liberating himself from the collective scowl of Holmes, Watson, and Moran. He wandered on foot to Whitechapel—and, after a disconcerting detour in the aid of a Gypsy mother and child, to the Blue Raven Tavern.

To a comforting friend of the past.

It was well past 2 am by the time he arrived: an hour when the last of the drunken sods were staggering off home, even the opium houses were still, and the tavern was barren of customers. Lola Smith was wiping the counter top free of spilled Guinness and stacking dirty dishes for the sink when the maths professor stumbled inside.

The bar proprietress occasionally splurged on her meager funds and acquired truly sensational costume. Tonight was one of the nights that she chose to showcase such rare wastefulness, parading herself in a bright emerald taffeta gown with black lace trim. She raised a rakish eyebrow when she spotted her visitor: his snowy trousers mud splattered, his waistcoat unbuttoned and the shirt underneath half-tucked—usually the dapper criminal disdained such an appearance, more typical of his two idiotic, but lovable, employees, Marrow and O'Toole. But she could see why—he was half-draped in one of his many disguises, this one consisting of a pirate's rags, complete with an eyepatch over his monocle and a hook for one hand. He dropped the false iron digit to the floor of the tavern now, flexing cramped hand muscles. His face had that periodically lost, scholarly, absent expression on it, as though he'd been reading far too many cerebral texts and dissertations by dim candlelight. He approached her licking dry, parched lips, eyes wide, back just stooped enough to betray that age was beginning to catch up with his youthful prime: looking, overall, far too sweet, bumbling and harmless to be the notorious villain London knew him to be.

Or to have been.

But London only knew half of James Moriarty—at best. Lola knew him better. She let out a low whistle. "Bobby, dear, I don't think ye need another pint _tonight_!"

"I'm _not_ inebriated, Lola," he snapped back, hunching over onto a bar stool and glaring at the dark deep-cut wood grains of the counter top. "Have the courtesy not to make assumptions about my conduct."

She trumpeted a hearty laugh; it was always amusing to hear such high-browed words as "inebriated," "courtesy," and "conduct" in her establishment, which bordered just at the brink of seedy, and was usually graced with verbal melodies far more Cockney than King's. It was even funnier when accompanied, as with Dr. James Robert Moriarty, by an Irish lilt. "Fine, then, sit here an' sulk. I prefer your company to loneliness with that madman galivantin' round these parts lately. I've a mind to tell that dear, dunder'eaded Kat Ferrell to stop goin' 'ome from work each night without Sebastian to escort her."

"She should be careful," Moriarty agreed, nodding his head absently. He folded his hands, unfolded, folded again, like a reluctantly praying priest. "And so should _you_, Elena. You don't _have _a Sebastian Moran, tiger killer extraordinaire, to escort you hereabouts."

"Oh, it's _Elena_ now, is it?" Again the proprietress crowed, swishing the filthy, sudsy wet dishrag across the countertop for one last wash. "Jove'n'eaven, sounds like this _is _serious business!" She tossed her wheat blond locks coyly, batting honey brown eyes at her long-time benefactor. "Yes, I know, Jack the Ripper's a madman and we ladies are cursed against fightin' 'im with these stupid little frail bodies. But we can still aim pretty decent at a fellow's groin wit' a sharp kid boot heel—oh, aye, aye, peace! I'll mind your advice, Bobby, no worries." Added in a tone of augmenting sobriety: for Moriarty had long supported her family, and those of many of London's spurned and forgotten unfortunates—with education and finances, and regardless of how such funds were earned, she was thankful.

He was a man who looked for troves in the trash of British society, that was for certain. Golden opportunity lay forever beneath layers of dross in his imaginative mind, much as his rival, Sherlock Holmes, sniffed out the secrets beneath layers of criminal deceptions. They were two of a kind, she was reluctant to admit, but thankfully she owed her allegiance only to the Irish-Egyptian scholar who flirted with unlawfulness, not with the meddlesome English detective who stoutly—and annoyingly—believed in the black-and-white delineations of British justice. So she paid what was due, and trusted Moriarty's word. And, while she was at it, since she had no other true attachments—and perhaps because she knew that it was all a game, that the upper-crust career criminal would never take her feminine wiles seriously—she let her more tender sentiments towards James Moriarty slip from time to time . . . bending a little farther over in his presence to display her scantily-clad feminine glory . . . tickling his nose with the plume of her singer's hat . . . trilling him a special little tune or telling coquettish jokes. And he would make her feel special—he would shed his surly, cut-throat exterior, slap his thigh and laugh at the jokes, applaud the songs, bow to her and afford her genteel courtesies—a kiss to the fingerless-gloved hand, a smile and a wink. She knew it was all in fun, but it made her even fonder of, and more loyal towards, the wickedly dashing maths professor. She sighed, obtaining a fresh rag from the washbucket. "Now, stop changing the subject, luv. What's troublin' ya?"

Moriarty shot from the bar stool, knocking over the ale mug she had, in generosity, set before his moustached muzzle. She grunted in shock and irritation as he darted behind the counter, flung himself into a pile of potato sacks by the sink, and sighed tragically. His head thudded against the stone wall. Hardly appropriate behavior for a criminal genius. But Oscar Wilde himself would have been proud of the poor man's angst. "I fear I'm near to losing my wits, Lola."

The proprietress hid a small, sad smile. She scrubbed the bar tops then with sudden fervor. "Why's that, luvvie?" But she knew. Oh, yes. She knew already. Word got around quickly in Whitechapel. And a woman, though feeble of body, was a powerfully wise and intuitive creature.

"I can't think anymore. Lost my edge—but it's more than that. Every obscure detail that I face, every waking moment, suddenly _she's _there . . ."

_Aha! Confirmed! _"She? She who? Is it _the _girl? The one who's _that man's_ landlady? The one ye kidnapped a spell ago?"

"Yes, Marie Hudson is her name. God, Lola! I plan a forgery scheme, and the gold coins that my mind conjures become her hair. I get up to take a walk, clear my head. But she's in a little child's laughter in the park. In the swans that move about . . .so gracefully, and take flight. Then I see some old codger sitting all alone at one of the benches feeding pigeons and reading a dusty old book, and I'm suddenly so afraid, and then sometimes, Lola, sometimes, damn it, how _foolish_ I feel, I actually say her name _out loud_ and the fear is gone. It's as though I'm desolate and overjoyed and . . _. frustrated_ all at once. What in hell has _happened_ to me, anyhow?"

"I'm afraid it's fatal, Bobby darlin'," she chuckled. "You're in _love_."

". . . The thought had occurred to me," he mumbled, glaring at the ceiling.

"And has it occurred to you to _tell_ Marie Hudson?" the barmaid prompted.

This time Moriarty fell silent. He frowned; those searing, arctic gray eyes grew distant. ". . . Maybe," he said at last.

_"It was most strange that my friend would behave so with the young woman, while paying her little attention  
otherwise. The only conclusion I could draw was since he had lived with Mrs. Hudson first, he felt that in a  
sense she belonged to him alone---if only to ignore."_

_--from Bedlam: Mystery of the Deluded Detective, by Ethel Grimes_

Madam Irene Adler had not graced 221 B Baker Street for a week following the discovery of her false claims of a trip abroad. And the dark circles under Sherlock Holmes's icy gray eyes, the eyes of a man perpetually peering through a microscope lens—showed the effects of the diva's absence. There had been some sort of quarrel, that was certain. The detective's blank-faced muteness at the breakfast table, his withdrawal from the casebooks, the Stradivarius, all but the hypodermic needle, only further proved the heart that he so constantly wished to disavow.

Marie Hudson made her most stalwart efforts not to worry for her tall, tobacco-scented, calculating tenant; motherliness only seemed to annoy him further. Recent developments in her own love life had, for the most part, enabled her preoccupation towards the well-being of another tall, wiry male intellectual.

But she had always, in her own way—as a seatide laps about a particularly admirable, unsettlingly incongruent shell on the beach, teasingly—loved Sherlock Holmes. Without the romantically despairing, Shakespearean notion of "undying devotion," perhaps, but still surely and truly, and with much fondness.

It was as though caring for him in his more decadent hours—on days when he had refused food or sleep as distractions to the solution of a case, had injured himself in a scrap with an antagonist, or the like—was something she was custom-designed to do, despite his outward protestations, and in addition to her other, less femininely conventional, lifetime occupations, such as aviation. And, most formidably, despite Holmes's stubborn insistance that, while he favored her over all other women, Marie Hudson was meant to be brushed off as no more alluring than some fat, florid old one-legged sea captain.

Thus, inspired by her other tenant, Dr. Watson's, fierce medical and brotherly concern, she resigned herself to loyally stewing over the health and fortunes of the world-famous consulting detective, if only to be ignored, and appreciated—nay, _admired_—from but a private sphere. And should she be asked, she would avow her loyal mother-hen duties straight to Mr. Holmes's tsking face.

Though admitting her nurse-like nurturance of her tenant to her dear James, she feared, would prove a trickier conversation to weather. For what her poor lover sorely lacked in trust towards his fellow men (and women), he made up for in jealousy and injured pride.

Still, one dismal afternoon on the brink of March, the very relationship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes that Mrs. Hudson found both so peculiar and so enduring was called into question—one last time.

It was the kind of day in which a gray blanket of clouds languished over the building tops, taunting any lady on an excursion to bring umbrella or at least parasol, spitting down a rain drop here or there, yet never truly letting loose.

Much like the very emotions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

At 7 am, an early hour at which she alone had risen from bed, Mrs. Hudson was greeted by a trio of guests.

The tenacious little barmaid, Katherine Ferrell, had bestowed another visit upon the widow, entering from the back window of the house—for along with her came two unlawful companions: her irascible fiancé, Sebastian Moran, and Mrs. Hudson's lover, Moriarty himself. Moran bid Mrs. Hudson a curiously curt good morning and lodged himself in the first floor study with a newspaper and a sinister little tanker of absinthe.

The maths professor, who had lately been a sterling assistant in the solving of the Ripper crimes, was spent from an evening search, in cognito as a seaman, of any new and suspicious customers to Whitechapel's seediest pubs. Bleary-eyed but retaining his courteousness, he dropped a tender kiss on the landlady's forehead. A friend at the Blue Raven Tavern had talked some sense into him, he claimed: How foolish to leave an angel's side for even five minutes!

The widow giggled, drawing her lace nightrobe tighter around her frame, and blushed in favor of his praise. Pleased, as it were, with _her_ pleasure, Moriarty gave a dreamy sigh—a noise that was, well . . . decidedly un-Moriarty-like, and thus twice as endearing as it might have been on a less cerebrally hard-edged, scholarly individual. He proposed a carriage ride through London, "with your hand in mine at every turning of the wheels, Marie."

Kat, of course, wailed one of her usual verdicts on _"how romantic it all was!"_

Colonel Moran stayed silently buried in the London Times.

As for Mrs. Hudson, her lips teasingly pecked her lover's cheek; then she withdrew to her bedchamber, tiptoeing barefoot over the creaky, cool floorboards of the still-slumbering house.

There was something girlishly thrilling to caring, for the first in several years, about how her appearance would be admired by a gentleman caller. She was thankful that her excitement was not the same as anxiety: Her more self-conscious female friends would have begun to fret over the appeal of their external shells—their complexions, and bodies—upon such a new manner of social company; her fiercely independent but secretly shy neighbor, a beautiful Scotch-Irish redhead named Marie McDowell, who hosted lavish parties in her home, enriched with Celtic music, the finest minds of the British Empire (Bram Stoker, Sir Henry Irving, and Oscar Wilde among them), and all manners of liquor, and yet stubbornly insisted on clinging the yearning secrets of her diaries and journals to her bosom alone, sprang to mind. Marie Hudson, by contrast, didn't doubt that her own physical virtues should go appreciated; in fact, she was calmly, undemonstratively confident about her own beauty. It was not that she neglected an added dash of rouge to her cheeks, or refused to brush her hair a few strokes more, when she knew James Moriarty was calling. Rather, Marie Hudson had the habit (what some backward thinkers would call "shocking" or "audacious")of attaching herself to suitors who thought she was the most radiant creation in God's Kingdom regardless of what she wore or how she looked wearing it. James Moriarty was, surprisingly, one of these men—far more interested in the _inner_ substance of a woman. It struck her that that extraordinary opera singer, Irene Adler, practiced a similar style of uncompromising courtship—an observation that she rather relished.

Presently, Mrs. Hudson seized and donned a quietly elegant costume: a pale blue silk skirt, a breakfast jacket of pale pique edged in lace scallops, tied at the waist, wrists, and neck in satin ribbons. To top it all, a sweet little bonnet was pinned to her canary-hued head, typing at the chin as a child's would, emanating the impression of her own retained innocence. Moments later she padded out into the foyer, her steps muted by satin slippers. Her dear scholar waited for her there, with a napkin-full of toasted scones—their breakfast—in his arms. His entire drooped form rejuvenated at the sight of her, even though he had seen her more lavishly dressed and stunningly kempt on numerous occasions—when they had crossed paths in Mr. Holmes's detective work, and she was ornately decked for French restaurants or London Air Field Festivals. But it didn't matter to him at all. To him, she might as well have worn a scratchy gray wool frockcoat that hid her every feminine curve, and still he would be grinning at her like Mr. Carroll's Cheshire Cat with a belly full of mice.

"You're _stunning_ this morning, my Sweet," Moriarty breathed, as that precise impish smile, so boyish despite the myopic monocle and receding hairline, materialized on his face. "I cannot tell you how wondrous it feels to finally be able to say it to your face."

Yes, Irene Adler's lifestyle—and Marie Hudson's—was definitely the lifestyle of the Femme Victorious. With no self-compromise came no regrets.

Mrs. Hudson paused by the front door, by the little night stand where she always set fresh-cut blooms bought from the street flower vendors, or from her own garden. Today they were red and yellow daisies again, and some pinks splashed in as well. She plucked up a handful, remembering an errand of the heart that she needed to run. She craned her neck over her shoulder, grinning like a bashful child at the import of the particular kind of bloom. She had decorated her new lover's hideout in these flowers last year, when he had abducted her and, instead of using her to vanquish Holmes, had sacrificed his heart up to her mercy.

"They looked even better in my bedchamber last year," the Professor breathed, blushing softly to meet the pink in the landlady's cheeks. "Never seen flowers nor tasted kidney pie so wonderful since."

Her grin grew mischievous. "Nor had a kiss so wonderful?" The angle of her gaze, over her shoulder, enabled her fair green eyes a greater register of impishness than she usually employed.

His eyes, even that partially obscured by the monocle, glittered to match her smile, though the rosy hue in his cheeks deepened to a scarlet. "No—nor that. Save the kiss that I was given last night." He licked the lips that had been so recently graced, and winked at her in a manner that belied a trace of roguishness.

"Ah. How could I forget?" The widow received the gesture with delight and aplomb. She lifted the daisies to his face. "James, I would like to make one small request. I need to visit someone . . . very dear to me."

He took her hands, clasped about the daisy stems, without a moment's hesitation. "I am at your disposal, my love." Then he leaned towards her and inhaled deeply of the blooms, childlike, eyes shut, in awe of them. "Completely," he then exhaled, eyes fluttering back open.

Oh, yes, Irene Adler was a genius.

They feasted in a luxurious black brougham driven by Smiley and Todd—one of the few things, the Professor told her, that his father had allowed him to inherit—gulping down warm cinnamon scones doused in creamy butter.

Today had been James Hudson's birthday. Marie Hudson wanted only to lay some daisies by his grave—they had been his favorite bloom, too, their firmness and survivalism so cleverly shrouded by nature in their dainty shells when really they were like floral tigresses inside. They had reminded him of Marie.

James Moriarty liked this thought—for it was a conclusion at which he, too, had arrived, and it was why he, too, now loved daisies. But he kept still, for they had arrived at the cemetery where the late Mr. Hudson lay. Now was a time to yield to the thick blanket of the past, as it descended on the Professor's lover—a past in which he, to his silent anguish, realized he had no part. Marie's best friends from her childhood—MacBain, Nesbitt, and the like—were hardly even willing to speak to him. What possible good could that do Marie's heart?

He shook himself free of his miserable reverie to watch her depart from the carriage and approach the grave—a humble marble tombstone hardly sufficient for the great man that his lover had described. Such was the injustice of the world, that lesser yet richer men should have far more ostentatious monuments to their memory. Then James Moriarty remembered a certain unsuccessful scheme in which he had tried to force a famous sculptor to make a gold statue of his visage, for his own "posterity and fame," and shuddered at his own repulsive arrogance. He was among these lesser but richer men, not fit to lick James Hudson's boots, and the though unsettled him: For if even James Hudson was barely worthy of an angel like Marie, then what was _he_?

Mrs. Hudson paused halfway to her husband's grave, catching her lover mid-shiver. "My dear, are you cold?"

Moriarty started, shaken from his frightening dreams. "No, no, my sweet girl, I am fine," he firmly pledged. He offered to stay behind at the carriage, to allow her some privacy, but this thought saddened her: She needed his presence, she claimed. It was a rare honor to be the man whom Marie Hudson deemed worthy of support, for typically, she needed no support—not from _anyone_. So he leapt from the carriage and trailed her at a respectful distance.

Oh, what pain to watch her doing this, and to have no way of comforting her! Moriarty stood, hands at his sides, two feet behind his lover; after a moment, when sharp muscle cramps accosted his palms and fingers, he realized he'd begun to wring those hands together. The widow stood rigidly in front of the grave of her first James, her hair loosed down and tumbling all around her face, in the desolate, soft breeze through the cemetery. A sharp expression crossed it, and quickly she turned her back to the Professor, hand clasped over her mouth, shoulders shaking once, violently. He crossed the distance between them in less than a second, but by the time he had reached her, and taken her hair, stroking it, she was composed again.

She glanced up, almost sheepishly, at his face. "I still miss him," she told the criminal genius needlessly. Or perhaps it was more for herself than for him.

There was pure agony, for her, in Moriarty's eyes. "He loved you," he mumbled. He had not anticipated talking, not until they had returned to the carriage, but these words seemed to spill out of their own accord. "Really. He loved you. I know it. He regretted nothing. You made him . . . happy." He felt ridiculous speaking so forthrightly of a man he had never met, and yet he was as convinced of the statement as he was of his own name. Was the spirit of James Hudson speaking _through Moriarty_, somehow? Knowing him, perhaps, to be his successor in the possession of her heart?

Mrs. Hudson's face was tight with the effort to seem well, to seem calm and unaffected by one loved and lost. Five years too many of having to do this, the Professor mused, when grief is no crime at all. Unless one is a woman, and not allowed to be anything but cheery and flawless. For a moment, he hated England again, unabashedly, for its twisted and inequitable sense of morality. Then he stopped himself, and focused instead on the one woman that he cherished.

She was bending over her husband's grave, dropping the daisies over it. "There," she said. "Now he is happy. Now I am happy."

The criminal fixed her in her most perceptive of stares. "You do not always have to be perfectly alright to be a good woman—to be a _great _woman. Or to have my . . . regard."

She only smiled back at him, lopsided, bittersweet. "Thank you, James," she said, although he could tell by her tone that what he had said had somehow missed the mark. He knew. He had not said _it_ yet. "Regard," but not _it_. Not what she had said to him. He was still far too afraid of _it_. For _her_ sake.

Then, as he offered his hand and they began to stride, somberly, for the carriage, he saw a perfect reminder of why he should fear saying _it_—for _her_ sake:

There, a much larger marble tombstone, ornate and gilded with angels, and not ten feet away from the grave of James Hudson, was the grave of Elizabeth Hardy: the only true love of Sherlock Holmes.

Moriarty's first murder. He gasped, inadvertently, aloud. "Oh . . . God."

Mrs. Hudson jumped at the sudden discharge of air from between the Professor's lips. "My dear, what is it . . . ? Oh." She saw it too. Too weakened by her own personal grief to act decisively, the widow let her gaze fix upon the grass just in front of Hardy's grave, neither acknowledging nor ignoring the evidence of her lover's past cruelty and sin.

Moriarty's hands unwittingly drew away from his lover and enwrapped his thin, cringing frame. So cold, suddenly, and he was as effective at making another creature warm and safe as a blanket with moth holes. He could not even warm himself.

"I did not know that she was buried here," he murmured, and the light in his eyes was snuffed utterly. "She was 17. I forgot how young . . . when I . . ." Like a shellshock victim, he blankly took in a small vase of daisies—the exact same color and size as those that Mrs. Hudson had brought to her husband's grave, only a few days less fresh—sitting by the tombstone. "Holmes came to see her recently," he concluded in a thin voice. " . . . It was an accident, you know. W-what I . . . did . . ." And then he said no more.

"Come," Marie Hudson interrupted the silence at last, retrieving her lover's hand and drawing him to the carriage, where a somber Todd and Smiley awaited. "We will neither of us dwell on the past any more today."

"_You _should _not _be comforting _me_," he retorted, with a new and sudden ferocity, directed more at himself than at her. He tore off his cloak then, and wrapped it around her. "Not today. Here, please. For _your _comfort, my girl." He rested his hands on her shoulders so that the warm, oversized garment would not slip off of her. Then he forced a smile that promised he would shed his melancholy.

There was a leftover lukewarm scone waiting for Marie when they remounted the carriage. It had been meant for Todd and Smiley to split, but they had kindly left it for her; they had understood the difficulty of her visit here. She took it after some coaxing by all three men, and nibbled on it as they rode back towards Baker Street.

Here was the time most cherished by a female lover—the simple, intimate silences, the peace of unspoken communication, in which the Beloved extends his finger to gently brush crumbs from his lady's face, chuckles at how her fresh young eyes widen at the unfurling morning scenery, laughs outright as she scatters the remaining breakfast crumbs to the pavement for the pigeons—even entices one bird to enter their carriage and eat from her palm—"my dearest Marie, I think you've bewitched yet another gentleman, albeit feathered!"—chuckles again, leans close, touches her free hand, takes a deep breath and at last holds it—and considers such simple physical contact inside the warm, enclosed space equally as satisfying as any full consummation in a wedding bed.

This time, for Marie Hudson, ended far too swiftly, although when she asked the Professor to consult his pocket watch, she discovered they had been out riding for over three hours, and her tenants were sure to be awake and restless for their own breakfast.

She was the first to dismount the carriage; no, she protested, she would not allow her suitor to help her to dismount when he was perfectly exhausted and she perfectly capable. It was then that she was greeted by the stormy faces and rigid postures of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson—both, still, in their nightshirts and caps.

"Mrs. Hudson," the good doctor cried, "we were _dreadfully_ worried about you." He doffed his nightcap and scratched his head in an expression of utter, bleary-eyed bewilderment.

"Did you think I abducted her to my hideout again, gentlemen?" Moriarty pounced immediately on the landlady's behalf. His two young employees bristled together with added offense, but he alone struck as an imposing figure, sizing Holmes and Watson up with a competitive spirit that narrowed his eyes to dagger slits.

"Let _me,_ James." Marie turned and squeezed his arm, conveying a request for his reticence. He sighed and drew obligingly back.

"We aren't speaking to _you_, Professor," Holmes injected brusquely. "Mrs. Hudson, what did you think you were doing, gallivanting off at early hours without telling me . . .I mean, _us_? The door was left ajar, and the Colonel and Miss Ferrell were . . . preoccupied . . . together in the study, and hadn't seen you since they first arrived. We feared that the Ripper had made another attempt to. . . we feared the _worst_." His piercing gray eyes were unforgiving—but they scrutinized her as severely as they did Moriarty, and for that egalitarian treatment, the widow was grateful. But the content of his words—their immediate assumption that she was no more potent in an emergency than a damsel in distress—overrode her appreciative emotions. She forced herself to flash a bright smile, though her words were incisive.

"Mr. Holmes . . . Sherlock," she curtly countered, deriving a small bristle from Moriarty, who was disconcerted that his lover uttered his rival's Christian name. "I was _not _aware that I needed to inform you of my _every_ coming and going from my _own house_. I was visiting my husband's . . . final resting place. James was with me, anyhow."

The detective set his jaw and fixed a gaze upon Moriarty that was akin to a hawk plunging to the river for its fish. "I suppose that, somehow, is meant to _comfort_ me," he seethed.

"_Sherlock_ . . . " she began, more than a little shocked by his acrid tone.

"_Please _don't bother. I'd prefer to be spared the sound of your voice justifying _him_." Before anything more could be said, Holmes whirled on his heel and stalked inside the boarding house.

Moriarty, who could think of nothing more vitriolic that would still honor Mrs. Hudson's request for docility, uttered a loud, bemused snort, and rolled his eyes.

" . . . Oh, dear," Dr. Watson murmured his usual bland but kindhearted summation, eyes wide. He cleared his throat, frowned in befuddlement, and patted Mrs. Hudson's arm.

Watson had ever been the more courteous of the pair of crime solvers that resided at 221 B—even if less brilliant.

"My dear," he expounded, "you . . . you must forgive us. Holmes and I care _deeply_ for you, and our fears drive us to be old-fashioned and stuffy when it comes your well-being."

"I suppose," Moriarty put in stiffly, "that _that _at least _is_ forgivable, Doctor." He bridled his chest proprietarily, stroking his lover across the back.

"Yes," Mrs. Hudson conceded, gracing Watson with a brief embrace. "Your care for me has been a mainstay in my darkest hours, Dr. Watson. I forgive you your overbearing sense of protection—just this once!"

The doctor chuckled, his stout, rotund figure shaking as disarmingly as the belly of St. Nicholas. "You are beginning to sound like that vixen Irene Adler!"

"Why, Doctor, what a lovely thing to say!" The landlady beamed at a remark that was meant to caution her against radicalism. She was too progressive, of course, to realize that radicalism, and Irene Adler's wiles, were something to be cautious about.

Watson shook his head. Then, reluctantly, he turned upon Moriarty, and whetted his lips. He began to speak, then reconsidered, his bristly moustache giving a little shiver of resignation. "You are, of course, welcome to join your friend and his fiancée in the parlor while we breakfast, Professor."

Moriarty's lips curled; aside that, he seemed to make a legitimate effort not to appear smug. "How courteous of you, Doctor," he purred, gesturing at Todd and Smiley to depart. They saluted him like true sailors, and clopped away, the great shining black brougham dissolving into the now-teeming masses of the London streets. "After you two," he said with a bow in the direction of the landlady and her more genial tenant.

When they entered, Holmes was nowhere to be found—although the tell-tale mudprints from the foyer leading up the stairs to the laboratory, and the creaking of floorboards above their heads, was evidence enough of his angered destination. Moriarty shrugged, kissed Mrs. Hudson lingeringly on the hand in front of the cringing Watson, and joined Colonel Moran and Kat Ferrell in the study, where he dozed off into sound slumber in one of the fat-stuffed armchairs.

Moran, inexplicably, bristled at the exchange between lovers, but said nothing, returning, with a pointed crackle of the newspaper, to the daily headlines. After a moment he snitched a last look at his friend and the widow; finding her blowing a coy last kiss at the professor, he relinquished the London Times, drew a pack of cards from his vestcoat pocket, and engaged himself in a cardsharp's duel of Solitaire, snatching Aces from the deck and slapping them upon the table—growling, all the while, deep in his throat. Kat took note of her fiancé's peevishness and rose to greet Marie, leaving Moran to his brooding.

Dr. Watson retreated alone to the kitchen; he had taken the liberty to prepare eggs, bacon, and biscuits for himself and the self-secluded Holmes in the landlady's absence, and his appetite was well whetted.

Together, Kat and Mrs. Hudson retreated once more to the widow's bedchambers. They returned more pragmatically clad—at least Marie did, for Kat refused to dissemble her saucy attire—in straw hat and pink house dress. They sojourned to the garden, transferring some early geraniums and basil bulbs from Mrs. Hudson's garden to the pots in her kitchen, for the frosts of recent mornings had done the plants ill.

"Is that _them_?" Kat chirped, face flushed with conspiratorial and tickled serendipity, once all gentlemen in question were left behind in the house. She pointed at the barren rose bushes. "The ones he . . .?"

Mrs. Hudson paused for a moment to gaze fondly at the thousand little pieces of wire, and the long-browned blooms, still fastened securely to her rosebushes. Never had she felt such tenderness towards dead flowers—the product of James Moriarty's rare but fiercely genuine love gesture on the day of she and her late husband's wedding anniversary that past February. "Yes," said she. "Those are the ones."

"Oh, _Marie!"_ the seedy barmaid wailed, jumping up and down with the watering can, her copious jewelry, ostrich plume, and risqué dress disheveling, and all but revealing her unmentionables, while her more decent friend stood giggling uncontrollably at her reaction. Some of the nosier neighbors peered disapprovingly, shaking their heads and clucking, over their own garden walls. "How _romantic_! Oh Sweet Jesus in Paradise! Oh _Saints!"_

_"_Yes, yes, Kat, my goodness, come up for air!" the landlady cried, embracing her schoolgirl friend to pacify her. "It is indeed most romantic, isn't it?"

"Like when the prince went through the thorn brush to rescue Sleepin' Beauty from the dragon!"

"No, no," Marie Hudson scolded, her little upturned pink nose crinkling with distaste. "I don't fancy being the helpless damsel. More like Fa Mulan and her General Li—well, dear, I believe the Orient is more scientifically advanced and there would have been monocles in China during 'once upon a time.' Yes, I see the two of them riding hand in hand through the bonsai gardens, past the treacherous poison vegetation, outwitting the dragon _together_!" She stood, giddily brandishing her little hand shovel. "And with the wyrm thus vanquished, the warrior princess leaned towards her soldier in the garden of orchids, to offer him a . . ."

"A-a most _passionate kiss_!" Kat finished with a shriek of glee, and the neighbors all rolled their eyes and clucked again. A few moments passed and the two returned, still with occasional spats of giggles, to their chore.

Sherlock Holmes, in all his morose glory, found the merrily busy ladies teetering with many large pots-full of spicy-scented plants and rushed to their aid. His face brightened. "My dear Mrs. Hudson, you are ever so ambitious with your botany experiments!"

She giggled, waving a fresh dirt-speckled hand. "Oh, Mr. Holmes, the aim of my green thumb is purely practical, I assure you! No 'experiments' for me—not even since James gave me that fascinating botany text!"

"I wish I could say the same," he murmured, his face curiously grave. "But there is no turning back from the current experiment that I wish to conduct." Little creases formed on the small glimpse of forehead beneath his mop of hair. She realized that, through his deceptively jaunty charm, insecurity exposed itself. "May we go inside and speak about something that . . .has weighed upon me very heavily of late? Before I . . . " He tried to relax himself with a chuckle. " . . .before I end up looking like your frosted geraniums?"

For once, his jokes did not meet with her laughter, for she was too alarmed by his urgency. "Of course," she granted, ushering him inside, the air of the nursemaid already descending upon her manner. "Please come sit in the kitchen. Sit and rest, and talk."

It is at this point that I, Dr. John Watson, confess my shameless inclusion in the conversation to follow between my dear friend Sherlock Holmes and our mutual acquaintance, Marie Hudson. Holmes had been unduly sullen—and boring—company that morning, spending most of his time sneaking more than his usual clandestine peeks at Mrs. Hudson while she went about her daily chores, and otherwise utterly inactive, sulking in his sitting chair. So I had engaged in my own methods of self-entertainment. I was indulging in my sole sinful habit of snacking past the repast when I heard the entrance of the landlady and detective, their footsteps clipping smart little thud-thuds on the foyer rug. After finishing my eggs and bacon, I was dipping my fingers into her latest culinary masterpiece—a strawberry shortcake. So mortified was I (for I had neither Todd nor Smiley on the premises upon which to blame my pig-like crime) that I leapt—craftily, I thought at the time—to the nearest exit: to my dismay, the broom closet. I am still loath to admit my intrusion, but as my friend always says, the facts are the facts and there is nothing more divine than the truth. But I digress.

" Kat . . ." Mrs. Hudson then addressed her female companion; the barmaid known as Kat Ferrell had been crouching at the doorstep, still bracing her terra cotta planters, apparently refusing Holmes's help in the transport of her floral burden. I peered through a crack in the closet door, spotting her tan-crème face and black-ridged emerald eyes, bright with devilish peevishness, peeking through the furry geranium leaves.

"Aye?" she snapped; I noted that the glare, and the nasty tone, were really intended for my fellow tenant, not for the landlady.

"Why don't you go keep Sebastian and James company for a few moments?"

"Gettin' rid o' me, then?" The girl dropped the planters to the kitchen countertop, drumming her now-free fingers upon it.

"My dear Miss Ferrell," Holmes hissed, "have you never heard of _confidentiality_?"

The item of discussion he wished to initiate with Mrs. Hudson must be so urgent that not even his latest suspicions of her family character, as related to the Ripper crimes, were important enough to detain her in his present company.

"No more than you ever heard o' _politeness_, Mr. Holmes," the girl seethed back, marching out of the room.

Mrs. Hudson laughed softly after her. " She is a good girl," she assured her tenant. "Only a little stubborn sometimes, and a bit opinionated about people of whom she gets a poor first impression."

Holmes shrugged. "Time will tell. At least I cannot judge her at the present moment, when I in fact share her vices. But to the matter. Mrs. Hudson . . . _Marie_ . . . I . . ."

Her heart, for reasons she couldn't discern, suddenly thundered. "Yes?"

"We have lived together in the same house, and shared many, _many _things, for . . . a long time, have we not?"

"Why . . . yes, of course."

"I regret much of it. An idiot I often felt—a brazen idiot. You see, I shan't fool myself into thinking that I have been successful in cloaking my feelings towards you."

"Actually, Mr. Holmes . . . _Sherlock_ . . . you _have_."

This made my ingenious, master detective of a friend pause: thunderstruck. His jaw dropped. "I . . . _have_?"

"I am afraid so."

He stared at her, long and hard, but not in the way that he stared at murder suspects, or challengers. Not in a way she—or I—had ever seen him look at someone before—except a certain femme fatale opera star. It was the kind of look on a child's face when trying to decide between laughter and tears, and settling for a crumpled, astounded, glazed stare. Indecision—and serendipity, painfully restrained. And then Sherlock Holmes crossed Mrs. Hudson's kitchen, seized her face, and, clumsily . . .

Kissed her.

She drew back, gasping for air, too startled to know whether or not she enjoyed the romantic assault. I have asked her, many times following the event, how she really felt when my friend so rashly sprang upon her. What she did know, she claims, was that long after they had disengaged, she was still breathless—that everything around her suddenly smelled of pipe tobacco and chemicals—and she wasn't sure if it was an offensive odor or a comforting one. "Mr. . . . _Holmes_ . . .?" She presently squeaked.

"There," he said, looking more terrified, more desperate, than amorous. Half his face was hidden in his wild, bohemian tangle of hair. "Was that clear enough?"

Mrs. Hudson must have felt the closeness of the kitchen, the warmth and the lack of oxygen, in that moment. Her head must have spun and she must have realized that when her tenant had sprung upon her, she had been backed into a corner. For there was giddiness in that tiny territory that she could claim between them, attraction and flirtation and disbelief, but there was also entrapment. A sense of a gramophone machine being slightly off kilter, having once able to hit its mark upon the record, and to make exquisite music, but forever lost to silence because it had never once touched the vinyl. What could have been between Marie Hudson and her ingenious tenant, her beloved charge whom she nurtured and nursed . . . was . . . just not . . . just . . . not . . . well, I am sure I cannot describe it. It was once my own fool's dream to be with our landlady, before I met my beloved and deceased Mary Morstan. But I had always known that whatever tangled, tender thing was between my friend and the widow was somehow more formidable, more real than a mere dream.

"Sherlock," Mrs. Hudson half-panted, tugging at her collar, as though it had grown tight. "Whatever happened to Irene Adler?"

A sound question, I thought.

Holmes drew himself up to his full towering height, his fear lost in his indignation. "Y-you . . . didn't answer _my_ question."

"Perhaps that is because I do not know what to say." She rubbed her lips absently; they were red and blotchy, hot and sore from his sudden, forced expressions of romance. "And because I had thought it plainer than anything that has ever occurred between us that you feel . . . _very_ strongly . . . for Ms. Adler."

His terror augmented. He almost looked like a frightened child who had lost his governess in the forest. In that very brief instant, her torso leaned forward towards his; she must have fought the urge to return his physical expression of romance—yes, but for a millisecond, nonetheless. Luckily for her, the fear in his thin, alert face was shrouded again in his dependable mask of cool, challenging logic. Poor Holmes: It was likely that many of the times that he paraded his famous deductive façade, he was truly as afraid as anyone else—only with the added burden of never allowing himself to show it. He swallowed, and calmly, carefully replied, as though cerebrally discussing the nature of his latest chess game move, "I do not see why you might have reached such a conclusion."

"My dear friend," she giggled, so suddenly that it sounded more like a nervous hiccough, "I am not blind to the silent little exchanges that existed between you but a week ago. And even more . . . ah . . . 'condemning' is the fact that your confidante Dr. Watson has claimed in his Strand stories that you call Irene _The _Woman—that there is, in fact, only _one_ woman in your mind, one Superior Woman—and that it is _she_. And our dear sweet Watson _never_ lies."

I confess that my eavesdropping suddenly became supremely satisfying, having heard myself so well spoken of by such a lady. But I restrained myself from getting too carried away by the praise: For it seemed that Marie Hudson already had enough suitors to earn her a fierce and continual headache.

"But what of _you_? Why have you silently watched and submissively conjectured, without coming to me, asking me my feelings? Why have you assumed that I did not see _you_ as a Superior Woman as well?" Holmes burst out, gyrating an arm at her in that animated fashion that he so often adopted when injected to the brim with cocaine, or forced to suffer inconvenient twists in his cases. It must be excruciating, I mused in my dark clandestine space, for a genius to watch the everyday mistakes of ordinary people, and be able to do nothing to change the doings of existence. "Why have you given me no opportunity to prove _or_ refute the assumptions you made . . . about us, between us? For God's Sake! Even _Moriarty_ knew how I felt about you—and sought to use it when he kidnapped you! Everyone, Watson, Miss McDowell next door, the MacBains—_everyone _has formed an opinion about what is between us! Everyone but _you_, Marie! Why did _you_ not give me the chance to make facts and fictions out of all those opinions?"

"I _have_ given you chances," Mrs. Hudson gently replied. In his latest tirade, it seemed, she finally found her head and voice again. "_Many,_ Sherlock. Many moments alone, many words meant to lead to an action, a sweet nothing, a kiss. But you _chose not_ to seize them. _I_ cannot force you to choose what you will—that is _your_ doing. And because I am not a woman who lingers on inactivity, who believes a relationship involves _shared _effort . . . well, I gave up on it, and you became more a very close and reliable _friend _in my heart than a lover. Even though I am, and always shall be, _unspeakably_ fond of you." She took his hands and squeezed them, a dreamy sea green residue of past romantic attraction confirmed in her gaze.

"And because James Moriarty relentlessly pursued one little hint that you might care for him . . . " Holmes took a ragged breath, scowling fiercely, in frustration. ". . . because of that_, he won you_."

"I would not say it is as simple as 'winning,' like in some sort of . . . of . . . baking contest. More than mutual attraction constitutes a love affair, Sherlock. There are common experiences, beliefs, compatibilities . . . But . . .essentially . . ." Marie Hudson smiled and apologetically shrugged. "_Yes,_ essentially, that is correct." She squeezed his hands again, for his head had drooped into a dejected sort of bow, a moaning sigh escaping his lips. " But, my dear friend, do _not _despair. You have learned a lesson from this. A lesson that you shall apply when your _real_ lifetime lover comes along."

"And who might _that _be?" he bitterly queried. "I thought I knew, Marie. But when I last kissed Irene Adler on the lips—Irene Adler, whom you claim I so revere—it was _your_ name, not _hers_, that I accidentally uttered."

I was shocked to see that Mrs. Hudson was far less taken aback by this confession than would be most ladies with more than one man pursuing their hand. Most ladies would helplessly—and perhaps delightedly—swoon, bathed in flattery. But Marie Hudson was, after all, not 'most ladies,' nor was she helpless. She smiled, and quickly, as though before she could stop herself, embraced the detective. A gasp caught in his throat, his face pained, and stiffly, as though he had forgotten how the gesture of affection operated, hugged her back.

For he knew he would never get the chance to do it again.

"Oh, God, Marie." It was spoken with such purity, such candidness, that no actor could falsify. Often his voice had wavered near such feeling, but only _near_ it, when he had spoken of his deceased lover Elizabeth Hardy. Now he was at the brink of divulging his whole secret self to his landlady. "There was a time when I wanted you like _nothing_ else on this earth. _Believe _it."

And the widow knew she would never get the chance to witness her peculiarly introverted tenant like this again. I was vaguely aware that I probably would not, either.

She did not hold back. She never did. "And it was once a mutual desire," she breathed. "In Sweden, when you got Mac his retribution, when we landed on that airfield in the midst of triumph. Yes, my dearest friend, I _would_ have kissed you then . . . _Then_."

"I . . . understand."

"Oh, Sherlock, you are such a brilliant _fool_," she softly exploded, while he held her. "You yourself said the crucial word: _'Accidentally.'_ The same thing happened to me a very short time ago. I misplaced my feelings too—on Tommy Nesbitt. I kissed him when really it was _James_ that I loved. You said my name because you knew your truest feelings—and most _frightening_ feelings, my dear Sherlock— were for Irene Adler. And you didn't want to chance ruining it all on the only person that _really_ mattered to you. So you tried to find a substitute. I am glad for us _both_ that such a substitution has been _unsuccessful_."

"Mrs. Hudson," came my friend's voice, muffled and humbled almost beyond recognition through Marie Hudson's canary hair. "Verily, I don't know _what_ I'd do without you!"

"Capital! Hold on to that sentiment! For I'd be _exceedingly_ grateful if you two would frolic off to some bedroom or another," a pliant voice wove in and out of the shadows down the hallway. Like schoolchildren caught in a naughty act, Marie Hudson and Sherlock Holmes flung apart from each other. Humiliated at being discovered in so vulnerable a state, my friend glared daggers in the intruder's direction.

Sneering eyes, like bright-glinting blue stones, condemning all they viewed as inferior to their owner . . . they emerged as from a murky medieval moat. They peered through feral locks of olive green hair that framed a comely inferno-red face—a face incongruously debonair and savage. Thus Sebastian Moran, conveying sinister sulkiness from too much brandy and the theatrical effects of the blue smoke-ring of his lucipher, entered the kitchen. His very appearance belied the deception that a face of the Western hemisphere—the British Empire, even—equated "civilization." Or perhaps he had spent too many years in lands like India and Afghanistan, hunting big game in their jungles, where such a thing as civilization, due to the atrocities of both natives _and_ Imperialists, was a commodity rather than a status quo.

In any case, the way that Moriarty's right-hand man stalked in circles around my friend and landlady, that idiosyncratic growling sound gurgling deep in his gullet, raised my neckhairs stiff as I watched the transaction from my clandestine spot inside the broom closet—for there was nothing but bestiality, lately, plaguing my old army mate. Nothing, perhaps, but his true temperament.

Behind him skulked the atypically docile Katherine Ferrell, the guilt of the tattler forcing her eyes downcast. For some reason, distress had moved her to seek her lover and bring him to moderate, or to dissipate, the discussion between Holmes and his landlady—no doubt the product of eavesdropping of a similar nature to my own (only, in Miss Ferrell's case, voluntary). But from the anxiety in her deep green eyes, and the creases on her creamy hued forehead, her fiancé was not reacting as she had intended.

"_Really_, my dears," the Colonel continued, a soft, seductive growl-whisper that I had not heard from him since the case had begun, "I'd like nothing _more _than for you two to seal some world-shattering romantic ties. It would return my best friend's new arrangement of . . ." He paused to sweep that disdainful cobalt stare up Marie Hudson's stiffening frame ". . . _priorities_ . . .to their previously _correct _state."

He was egging on my friend's proposals of romance—and that, based on the wringing of the young barmaid's hands about her silk kerchief, was the last thing she had wanted. "Marie, I'm sorry," she interrupted at last, "we didn't mean to spy on ye. We'll go." Here she tugged on her fiancé's shirt sleeve.

With a viciousness I'd never before seen him display her, Sebastian jerked free of her grasp. "_Stop that_, Kat!" he snapped. "You _chose _to bring me to this conversation, so don't _censor _my _reaction _to it!"

"But I thought you'd want Marie with _Bobby_," she replied, in a breaking little voice much unlike that of her previous fiercely independent state. I wondered more at her alteration in temperament than at her actual confession; so, I noted, did the fiercely squinting Holmes. "Sabbie, I'm _desperate_ to get away from . . . from . . . _ye _know who. This way, you 'n I can marry and Marie n' Bobby can marry and we'll keep our best friends and all go live t'gether, in cottages in some woods next door to each other, an' . . .an' somewhere _far _from . . ."

"Kat! Stop being an idiot! Those were _childhood dreams_, all _right_?" the Colonel snarled, grabbing her arm. He shook it once, silencing her. "Bobby and I have to make a _living_, and it . . . it doesn't work when _she's_ around!" He nodded sharply at our landlady. "Understand? He goes _soft _around her! He doesn't want to do naughty things for booty anymore, because _she 'doesn't approve_.' "

Kat fell silent, choking back sudden tears. "But I wanted to get away, Sabbie. _Away_. W-with _you_."

"I _know _it, all right?" True frustration, as though he were agonizing over some impossible decision, weighed Sebastian Moran's handsome young face; he shook his head, wild hair gone even further unkempt, shielding a good two-thirds of those deep oceanic eyes. "_I love you_ and I'm _trying_ to make that happen! Just . . . _shut up_ so I can make that happen!"

Mrs. Hudson let out a disgusted huff and thrust her arms across her chest, cheeks afire with rage at the slander, but even more at the disrespectful treatment of her girlhood friend.

"Don't seem like _Bobby's _priorities are muddled," the barmaid mumbled, folding her hands in front of her.

_Who'd have thought?_ I mused sardonically in the closet.

"_What _did you say?" Sebastian grasped both his lover's arms. He only stood there, this time, plainly battling against the impulse to backhand someone upon whom, for all his violent tendencies, I was fairly certain he had never before lain a finger. At least, I _hoped _he hadn't

Kat would not look at her fiancé. It was, it struck me with admiration, almost more defiant an act than spitting in his face. ". . . _Nothing_."

Moran sighed, turning back to Mrs. Hudson, and Holmes. _"Fine." _

An intensely awkward pause, in which our landlady spared the Colonel none of her most withering, soil-a-grown-man's-linen, blue-green glares. He gnashed his lips back at her like a subtly rabid jaguar, fumbling with dangerously empty hands. I realized the motion he was making into the air, with those firm red fingers, was that of a strangler. I contemplated revealing myself in order to ameliorate the situation. But then Holmes took charge, as always.

" 'Muddled priorities?' Of your 'best friend', Colonel Moran?" he injected into the silence like a rapier through gelatin. His jaw muscles clenched. "Is this 'Bobby' of yours _Moriarty_?"

Sebastian only smirked back, dragging on his fat, flaming cigar, evading the question. "It's just been so _boring_ since he met _you_, luvvie." He licked his lips slowly, and eyed Mrs. Hudson, now, in a manner that made her, involuntarily, step backward, producing rapid distance between them. "No more jewel heists, forgeries, throat-slittings, nothing. Oh, not that I wasn't putting those things behind me _anyway_, what with Kat and matrimony and all." He shook his head sadly, casing a sidelong look at his pitiful fiancée, who actually brightened at the claim.

I did not like the bizarre sheen that came into his eyes just then. It made it evident that he was lying. "I just—forgive me, now—I never wanted to be _forced _into it by some _woman_. But you know . . . I _do_ like you, Marie, dear. I would never want to _hurt_ you. Not unless _pressed_."

Mrs. Hudson gasped at this, turned and reached for the sharpest knife in her pantry.

He giggled, a funny, heartfelt tittering, a perfectly wholesome, sane noise that would sound delightful coming from any other man—any other man than an assassin. And because of that, it was terrifying. "Ah, ah! Only a figure of speech, love. You know. I don't want to 'lead you on,' 'sugar-coat it,' make you think Bobby's a saint who loves you, 'break your heart,' and such. A figure of speech."

But the growling sound in his throat got louder, and those fingers continued to wriggle in a strangling motion. _Towards_ her.

She brandished the knife firmly in front of her.

"Sabbie!" Kat Ferrell wailed, more helpless than I had ever seen her. "_Calm_ yourself, luv!"

"_Be quiet_, Kat," he snapped again. Still advancing. "_Quiet_, now. I'm fixing _everything _for us . . ."

"A figure of speech, is it?" Holmes crossed the space between himself and Professor Moriarty's Chief-of-Staff before I could so much as scream from my hiding spot to our lady's defense. Like a vengeful lightning bolt, he seized the army man's shirt collar and shoved him—his superior weight, muscles, and all—against the opposite wall. Loose dishes and spice jars swayed and fell from their spots, and Sebastian Moran's cigar, along with his costly pince-nez, lurched from his mouth and muzzle to the wooden floor. Without those civilizing spectacles, all genial artifice fled from the Colonel's countenance. "Only a _harmless_ turn of phrase?" The detective bared his teeth, undaunted by the assassin's abruptly apparent savagery.

It was never a wise course of action to rouse the rare but formidable temper of Sherlock Holmes.

Sebastian Moran grunted and tried to lunge, but years of martial arts training offered Holmes the upper hand; he had the electrically charged army man firmly pinioned against the countertop. "_Cunning devil_," the Colonel seethed, "stop _assaulting_ me, I mean no harm!" Again he strained forward, those staggering blue eyes aglitter; this time the detective freed one fist and enmeshed vengeful fingers around Moran's throat. He squeezed once, in warning. The Colonel angrily gagged and fell still.

Our landlady let out a tiny cry. Then she dropped the cutting knife and fled the room, suddenly and with what I noted to be a strong purpose of direction. She was going to get help. Kat followed her.

"Is that a _promise_, my dear 'Fierce Shikari?' " Holmes persisted. "Or shall I take this to your employer and see what _he_ has to say about it?"

The bagger of a record number of maneating tigers flashed a hideous expression, somewhere between a grin and a grimace. I had not noticed before, somehow, how prominent and yellow his teeth were, hidden beneath that comely young face. " 'My employer'," he half-sputtered, half-purred, "still takes _my_ word over _yours_, no matter how much you and he 'bonded' when you were a lad! _I've_ nursed him back to life from _many _a knife wound_. I'd_ take a bullet for him, breech _any _socially sanctioned behavior to fulfill his missions. Not _you_. He _won't_ take _you_ over _me_, not eve n with that dainty blond secret weapon you've got to _soften_ his cobra heart! Ya savvy, _boy_?"

"You seem _far _too certain about _far_ too many things, sir," Holmes spat. "Why don't you see how the Professor reacts when a subordinate subverts him and challenges his actions in a time of crisis?" He loosened his grip on the Colonel for a brief instant, bending to retrieve his pince-nez from the floor. He offered it to the frothing army man. The assassin snatched the thing up and restored it to his nose with the viciousness of a tigress returned her sole remaining cub. He blinked furiously, focusing those lethal eyes upon his lanky young predator.

Then my friend returned his grasp fully upon the shirt collar of Sebastian Moran, who seemed too paralyzed by his own rage to resist. Holmes viewed his sputtering victim through newly hard, cynical eyes, belying the disinterest with which he huffed on his pipe. Its fumy jet cloud entwined with that of Sebastian's fallen cigar, but the Colonel was too guarded, to poised for another attack, to buck the detective's grip and retrieve his smoke.

Holmes spoke more airily now, knowing well his advantage in the argument. "Yes, why don't you see what the Napoleon of Crimediscerns of your 'jesting' little threats? Or am I wrong to see a twinge of fear in those lapis eyes of yours?"

"_You_ . . . You get your hands _off _me, _Mr._ Holmes, or Professor Moriarty won't have enough of you left to discern _ratfeed_ from!"__

"He already knows." As if on theatrical cue, Professor Moriarty himself stepped coolly through the door. He spoke calmly, but something queer and flashing in his eyes, still dark-rimmed by sleeplessness, forbade any manner of dissent. His head was snakishly oscillating.

_Oh, God_, I inwardly moaned. Still foolishly closeted.

Holmes indulged a small sigh and stepped back from Colonel Moran. The assassin made quite a spectacle about sniffing with injured pride, casting the detective an offended, pouting frown, and tidying his disheveled collar and bowtie—a plaintive plea for Moriarty's favor, I was sure, for Sebastian Moran was known to sally forth many nights barebacked, in nothing but a pair of khaki army trousers, his tiger-tooth-and-crucifix necklace swaying to and fro on his bare, heaving chest as he snuck in the bedroom window of one of the Professor's chosen quarry, his knife poised at some innocent throat caught unawares in bed. He was hardly a man that feared an unkempt appearance, and surely such a gesture of distaste at damaged costume served only to make the point that he had longsuffered at the private consulting detective's arbitrary temperament.

This time, however, the appeal did not work. "Sebastian, you _asssss_." Moriarty's voice practically _slithered—_lingering on the twin "s" of the insult "What's plaguing you? Stop making a scene. Go out and get some air." He turned and waved his arm dismissively, with stinging condescendence, at his chief-of-staff.

Thus ignored, and released from Holmes's grasp, Sebastian took ready advantage and reached for a sinister little air dart dispenser in his vestcoat pocket, each thorn dipped thickly in a potently toxic vegetable alkaloid that he had cultivated in India.

Only I—or so I thought—knew of his concealed weapon and, from my vantage point, of his current intent regarding it, so I chose this most clumsy moment to fling myself from the broom closet with a shout of, "_Holmes, look out_!" To my dismay, my act of chivalry found me tripping over the mop and sprawling on all fours on my stomach on the floor.

Moriarty flung back around and blinked at me.

My friend, who, it seemed, had been fully aware of the attack at hand, merely shoved his hands into his coat pockets and, unsuprised at my sudden entry, amusedly eyed my fallen form. "Good old Watson," he chuckled, to my further nettling.

"_Look out_!" I bellowed again, pointing at Moran.

"_Sebastian_!" the Professor barked, a cry simultaneous to my alarum and Holmes's laughter, but in a tone that was supremely more utilitarian—and convincing. "_I said get air!_ _Now_!"

The Colonel, indeed intent upon using his deadliest of weapons in a fit of passion, froze with the nasty device poised at his lips. He restrained himself at once, arms shoved to his sides. He cast his friend a resentful glare that mixed oddly with his desperately winsome voice. Almost like whining. "But, _Bob_-by, she . . . _he_ . . ."

"_Out! NOW_! _You're lucky I don't skin you right here in this bloody kitchen_! _GOT it?"_

" . . . Whatever you want," the truculent tiger-killer murmured, deferring, flinging the ivory-carved dart shaft to the ground, and skulking out of the room.

He passed Mrs. Hudson, who arrived, with hands planted indignantly on her hips, behind Moriarty. There was not a hint of the smug tattler, the weakling who had enlisted a bully, on _her_ face—no, only pride and self-preservation.

"_And _. . .?" the Professor prompted crossly, one index finger risen. He scowled over his shoulder at his departing friend. Again, a look, and a laconic use of words, not to be denied.

"And do forgive my temper, Mrs. Hudson," the Colonel gritted obediently, doffing an imaginary tophat in a mockingly eloquent flourish, as would a spoiled upbraided child. "It was all in good fun. Sorry it got . . . out of hand." Then he pressed his palms together and bowed to her, rigidly, from the waist, in the true style of Captain Nemo, or some other sheik-pirate of India, a land in which, I wondered, he might feel more at ease.

Mrs. Hudson merely nodded, tight-lipped, back.

He left the room, and the house, without once looking at me.

" 'All in good fun,' my _foot_!" I chose, at last, to make myself heard. I rose up haughtily from the floor, looking, I'm sure, utterly ridiculous—as, for the first time in that twenty-minute period, Marie Hudson suppressed a giggle.

"Good old Watson," Moriarty, to my complete chagrin, exhaled in relief and heartily echoed the very greeting that Holmes had, moments ago, uttered. Holmes joined him in another small spat of laughter at my expense, clapping me on the back and helping me to my feet. I scowled at them both.

"Oh, I'm _so sorry_!" Kat Ferrell pierced the second of mirth, sobbing uncontrollably. Humiliated, she buried her face in her hands, while Holmes, Moriarty, and I turned and watched in bumbling masculine helplessness. "I dinna mean ta force your hand, Marie! I just wanted to get _away_! And I wanted to take ye _with_ me!"

"My dear, _please _calm down!" Mrs. Hudson sobered at once, and braced her friend's shuddering shoulders, but Kat lurched away, sobbing harder still. "Kat? Please at least explain what you meant by. . ."

"No, no! I _can't!"_ The barmaid broke loose and tore out the door, out the house, in her pugnacious fiancé's direction.

Silence yet again.

" . . . Odd," Holmes mumbled, the sharpness in his gaze indicating the turning of his mental mechanisms. Then he regarded his former mentor, and current arch nemesis, with a cautious eye. Chivalry seized him; it would be dishonorable to go behind a rival suitor's back. "Professor . . ." he began.

"All water under the bridge," Moriarty cut him off quickly, with a surprising degree of graciousness. But it was obvious that he was quietly anguished by what, apparently, he had heard Holmes trying to propose to Marie Hudson. He had not been so far down the hallway when Sebastian Moran intruded, after all. "As you said before, Mr. Holmes . . . the choice is neither yours nor mine. I only pray _I _find favor." He cast a humble look at the golden-haired landlady, the decision-maker, in question. She sighed and conveyed her best reassuring smile.

Moriarty was, unfortunately, already looking away. His eyes roved for a moment—a look eerily reminiscent of the deep, perceptive scowl that had surfaced on Holmes's face seconds past. "I need to go speak to someone," he said. "Yes, someone that factors into this very equation. Tut, Holmes, m'boy—you may yet thank me for it. Excuse me."

They watched him slink determinedly from the room, the second person to follow in the footsteps of Sebastian Moran's tirade.

Then Mrs. Hudson stole a look at me. I nodded at my two friends and left them to the privacy that they had craved.

I strode slowly, however, my curiosity not yet bedded down. I snatched the end of their conversation.

"Sherlock, let me put it plainly: Why did you not kiss me before as you did today?"

" . . .I think . . . I think I did not know how. Not anymore."

"What changed that? Or, rather, _who_? It certainly was not _me—_or you would have seized the many opportunities I gave you. Think about that, my dear friend. _She _has done wonders for you."

She?

Of course. _The_ Woman. The _Only _Woman.

"I know," Holmes croaked. Goosebumps rose all along my arms, for I thought that my friend's cerebral capacities had actually arrived upon the point of reading my mind. But then it occurred to me that he was only answering Mrs. Hudson. " . . . I know . . .and I _don't _know what to _do_ about it."

_"You have had a wonderful insight tonight. You have seen in a glance what is wrong with the world and put it into one simple phrase, one motto, one undeniable and inalienable right: You need not regard yourself as beneath any man! There, go forth now, my child, and act upon it. Then who may say what you will do, and with whom, and when?"—from The Adventuress, by Carole Nelson Douglas_

For all his icily pledged abstinence from considerations tender—at least, when they applied to the majority of the female sex—the inalterably male Moriarty could not evade an initial blinking silence, and a hotness in the cheeks, when he was escorted inside Briony Lodge, and his eyes appraised the Divine Ms. Adler.

Irene sported the royal indignation of Marie Antoinette, the righteousness of a nun, and the sangfroid of a casino gambler. She was clad in a black silk gown, snug at the waist and plunging at the bosom to showcase her delicate voluptuousness, as though she expected a challenging—but susceptible—male caller. Frothy pink trim burst from her shoulders and skirt hem, and a fiery white diamond blazed at her throat. "Yes?" she greeted him, in a tone far darker than her dress. She rose from her lounge and marched across the room, towards the coat rack, right past the gentlemanly encroacher. He leaned knavishly on his walking stick, glowering back. "Ms. Adler, you cramp my style."

"Dr. Moriarty, you _let _me."

He opened his mouth to scathe her with response. It was at this point that he noticed, mounted for display on the far wall, a collection of gleaming silver . . . canes?

No, they were not canes. They were rapiers.

"You _fence_?" he blurted, momentarily distracted.

She flashed a cryptic smile. "To a degree. I played many trouser roles in the theater and the opera house, and was forced, between rehearsals, to learn a thing or two about the thrust and parry of the foil. But I am not a virtuoso like _you_. I hear fencing is your second love, second only to mathematics."

He was careful to force the compliment to slide past his ego, like butter through a knife. But it still left a similarly oily residue, a discontenting impression, upon him. "I . . . am well practiced, yes. The only opponent I ever found satisfactorily engaging was Mr. Holmes, when he was a lad, and my pupil." He cast her a sly sideling look, as she rearranged her hairpins to accommodate a bonnet: another layer of costume suitable for an evening carriage ride. "You know, Madam . . . It is strange that you avoid his company of late, considering how much you two have in _common_."

"It is even stranger that a naughty old scholar with whom I spent but _one_ night and _one _allegedly wicked scheme gives a _hoot_ about my comings and goings." Irene then adorned shell pink kid gloves, as though no stirring or stinging remark had the weight to deter her from her intended 5 o'clock ride. She withdrew one mini-rapier hairpin, smiling all the while, and gave his arm a poke to sharpen her punchline: "Or is _rude_ enough to inquire into _my _personal business!"

Moriarty bristled, recoiling from a jab both physical and verbal. "_Rude_? Madam, each time we meet, I endure scorn and indifference at _your_ hands—_enough_. I've more than one bone to pick with _you_." He tossed his snow white cloak behind his shoulders, flashing the bright pulsing crimson of its underseam, a worthy opponent to the flair of her own costume. "And I'm sick of putting it off."

"You come to confront me, then!" said she, offering him a demeaning laugh. "No one alters my course, old boy. Not the King of Bohemia, not even the _former_ King of the British Underworld." As ever, she softened the attack with a coquettish, falsely apologetic pout.

The Professor spoke in a dangerously controlled monotone. "Walk softly_, girl_. I may have repented myself to obtain the worthiness of a lady beyond my wildest hopes, but old habits still die hard. You may yet find your sinuous, languid little hide reposing in a long, narrow black bed if you rouse my wrath once more. Now, I know you're hiding a great deal of this Ripper matter from Holmes, but none of this fershlugginer romantic fluff is going to distract _me _from your two-facedness. Why don't you confess all, here and now? It might be easier than telling your 'deductive' lover face-to-face."

She observed her guest sidelong with topaz-flecked eyes—and, aside the warm glint they bore, with a mask of firm impartiality. "Professor, you have repeatedly asserted that you are no fool. I assume, then, that I have proven to your astute faculties that I am not only trustworthy, but I _also _lack the kind of erratic behavior that would jeopardize our mission. If I keep secrets, it is for Sherlock's good—nay, for _everyone's_. It's not _me_ you ought to labor to control. Rather, your boon companion, the Colonel, seems to have gotten a bit . . . testy . . . of late. Towards your lady and her tenants. Nasty glares, murmured curses, and the like. Since he saw you and her . . . ah, how to put it discretely? . . . _romancing_ outside her boarding house? I should think you and Mr. Moran are due for a heart-to-heart."

"_Colonel_ Moran and I implicitly agree that he obeys my every command, Ms. Adler," Moriarty hissed. "It is _he_ whom I _know_, not _you."_

"Familiarity does _not _ensure _loyalty_, Professor," the diva shot back, her voice, at last, spiking to a high volume. "_Believe_ me, I know that fact better than _anyone_. As does, I have recently been informed, _Sherlock_." Her eyes narrowed to dagger slits, their hot amber glow now truly ablaze.

Moriarty crouched forward, growling, involuntarily preparing to square off with his hostess. At once he understood the unspeakable betrayal with which she meant to undercut his gusto—his own betrayal, of his own protégé, many years past. "I thought you said the past was best left _buried_, Ms. Adler. Particularly _accidents_ such as the death of Elizabeth Hardy."

Irene drew herself up to her full height, showering a scathing upbraiding on her intruder. "You _meant _to kill a boy who worshipped you as a _father_. To whom you _were_, by all accounts, a father. Whether you did in Miss Hardy or not, that pistol of yours _was _still aimed at Sherlock's head. Your crimes, their success or failure, became _more _to you than his well-being. _That_ was no 'accident,' sir. It was the mark of a _true traitor_. I don't care if you've changed, if you now know how to guard yourself against muddling your priorities when it comes to Marie Hudson—if you clutch her newfound trust in you against your breast till you bloody _die_! In fact, in makes me wonder even more than ever that you _don't_ recognize the _same_ insidious characteristics that you once possessed in your _best friend_."

Moriarty bit his lip until he tasted blood. "I do not attempt to waive my wrongdoings. But Sebastian," he forced, hoarsely, through his teeth, "will _not _disobey me. He understands. He is much enamored with Katherine Ferrell . . ."

"Ferrell, is it, or _Ferrier_? And what consolation is _that_? A man's _supposed_ love? A _killer's_? You have _no_ assurance that he understands your newfound affection for Mrs. Hudson!"

"_Don't_ project your past emotional scars on _me_, witch! Your Bohemian banes and your barrister forget-me-nots! Bah! You recoil from men just as your _alleged_ lover shrinks from women—from _all_ affection, most likely! _Fools_, both of you." Moriarty beat his walking stick on the floor of Irene Adler's lodgings; the carpet dismayingly muffled what he intended to be a dramatic point of departure. Again he ruffled like a discontented parrot. "Go ahead, shrink away, _hold back_! You just cage your secrets and your voice and fritter your talents away with fear and age . . . while . . . while that idiot detective floats on a stupid sea of cocaine and opiates and dies _alone_! Some 'protégé!_'_ See if it happens to _me_, though! Just _see!"_ He thrust his wrist in a spurning gesture, pivoting on the point of his walking stick to the door, cape whipping like a torrid white ocean wave behind him.

"How _poetic_," Irene interjected acidly, determined for the last word. "But, as ever, your degree of self-confidence is prematurely _large_."

"_Meaning?"_ His lips curled into a snarl.

The diva charged, drawing herself up in the deviant academician's face, extracting her claws at last to their fullest length. "Meaning 'old habits die hard.' Like _you_ said. Meaning you are _arrogant_, and it makes you fall back onto the _same mistakes_. Meaning only fools in love forget that there is no such thing as _'safety.'_ Meaning you could hurt someone else that loves you—when you _least _suspect it. Sleep _well_ tonight, Professor Moriarty."

A door slammed—in his face.

Moriarty stood stunned at the maddeningly serene and silent outer threshold of Briony Lodge, suddenly realizing that he had been slowly and subtly pushed out of his opponent's abode—and had been viciously lashed in the duration.

And he was not alone.

There, leaning in the corner, in the waning shadow of the closing door, was a too-familiar lissome form, a thin, seamless muddle of purple, blue and black trousers, waistcoat, bandanna mask and plumed hat befitting some hybrid of Arsene Lupin and one of Dumas's musketeers. An onyx cape whipped in the stirring Serpentine Avenue breeze, concealing and revealing scornful cherry-wood brown eyes. "The lady bade you go, and I suggest you heed her," came an equally disdainful voice, raspy from being strained to a register lower than its natural pitch. The voice of a woman trying to sound male—indeed, she would have fooled him had he not met her memorably before.

"Miss Christopher," he curtly replied, doffing his top hat to the woman who had beaten him to both a diamond and a Royal Horse in honor of her late infamous father, Dr. Hamilton Christopher, a man of a previous generation who had been a professional thief—a thief whose prowess even the Napoleon of Crime revered as superior to his own. She had followed well in her father's footsteps, picking up the slack he had left when a leg wound and a mysterious, severe illness had first crippled and then killed the famed thief. Thus Alline Christopher, a girl not yet twenty years of age, had briefly usurped Moriarty's honored position as the front-page-headlines disaster-maker of London—and he had never forgotten it. "As ever, my dear young lady, your capacity to annoy me is astounding." He whetted his lips. "I _was_ leaving. But I don't fancy being _chased_ off _any _premises, just the same."

The masked woman tossed her raven hair and lashed her hand to a long, coiled black instrument in her belt. She retrieved it and cracked it at the cobblestones by his feet, faster than lighting—a whip. He jumped back with a small yelp. She winked at him, as maddeningly playful with her threats as was Irene Adler herself. "Nevertheless, neither of us needs to indulge in our usual rivalry this afternoon. Please go, before I'm forced to engage with you at an hour lamentably close to teatime."

"I must say," he persisted, keeping his eyes on her armored hand rather than her face, "that I'm intrigued, but not in the least bit surprised, to find that you and the lady of the house have built a rapport here in London. I am curious, however, to know what formidable feats the two-of-a-kind gentlewomen—if indeed I should attribute you two such a title—are planning."

Alline Christopher's eyes soundlessly giggled behind her mask. "Your curiosity will have to wait until another day, Professor Moriarty." She lifted her arm, and the whip, above her head once more. "Or should I ask you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes the same question?"

"Touche, young mistress," he leered, turning on his heel. He left without looking back—hearing her husky, soft laughter behind him was enough to spirit him quite promptly from the premises—however potently his intrigue lingered.

His ears still stung with Irene Adler's too-true words. He plucked his pocketwatch from his vestcoat and observed it. The entire heated exchange had taken five minutes, and the opera star and her newly appointed young bodyguard had unquestionably won.

Damn, she was good. Were he not so desperately enamored with Marie Hudson, he might even . . . but no. That, now, was beyond conception. The real, and troubling, question was, was the enduring love of that very Marie Hudson equally beyond conception?

_"Please, officer, don't hurt me."_

_Don't hurt _Her _as you have been hurt._

_Don't hurt _She. . . .

_. . . Whom you love. _

A thin, misty rain brought him from his dejected trance, and he hobbled down the street, too fearful of recognition, in broad daylight, to hail a cabbie.

Criminal living sometimes lacked its perks.

_"Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong one is until it's in hot water."_

_--Eleanor Roosevelt_

"I cannot believe," exclaimed Colonel Sebastian Moran in his jauntiest of military tones, "that you do not remember saving my life at Maiwand, John!" He shot from his seat and slapped my shoulder with playful scorn—my wounded shoulder from that very battle, causing me—and the meek young forms of Todd and Smiley next to me—to flinch. "Why, my taste for dangerous assignments was never satiated in the Russian cities in the north of Afghanistan, nor its eastern skirts of China, nor its southern border at India, but I tell you, old friend, it was at last given sobering tastes when one of those turbaned rogues gave me a good crack to the skull and I lay bleeding in the sand!"

"My memory is muddled," I offered docilely, shrinking into my seat, for many eyes were falling upon my angrily jovial companion as he stalked around our bar table. "There are a great many important events that I cannot . . ."

He did not seem to hear me. "And there you were, over me, offering me water while hell played its hand around us, and that was when you took that jezail bullet to the shoulder, old boy, and _I _haven't forgotten it . . . "

Apparently _he had _forgotten in _which_ shoulder I had taken the wound. I frowned, perturbed, but not because I had finally recalled the days preceding the enteric fever that discharged me honorably from the Afghanistan war front. No, rather, it was Sebastian's behavior that alarmed me: It suited a collection of stuffed, gilded, whiskered army has-beens playing cards and smoking Cuban cigars with Mycroft Holmes in the Diogenes Club—in short, arrogant men _wanting_ to be noticed as they delivered their huffy, impromptu speeches. Not, by any stretch, the indecent, drunken carousing of the one-armed sailor whose guise (wonder of wonders, _not _a female guise!) he sported:

There, in the Blue Raven Tavern, where we hoped, from our conclusions regarding the "Dear Boss" letter that had goaded Inspector Lestrade, to blend in and catch a glimpse of our hellish foe the Ripper.

Sebastian had been uncharacteristically rash in the days following the unsettling incident in Mrs. Hudson's kitchen—loud and curt and commandeering in his dealings with my detective friend, as though challenging some imaginary line of command in Moriarty's horde. Apparently defeat did little for his cooperative, team-spirited faculties.

Moriarty and I, also decked in costumes resembling the beggarly, leapt together to admonish Moran's current slip from character. "_Softly_, Colonel!" I mumbled sidelong to the tiger-killer. "Sebastian, you _idiot,"_ the Professor hissed less delicately, grabbing for his friend's arm, "do you _want_ us to stick out like elephants among rats?"

His Chief-of-Staff's azure glare riveted on him. "Of _course_, James," he snarled, his sarcasm as biting as oil of vitriol. "I've been out to _get_ you and your blond beauty, in _your _scrambled-up mind, since your _protégé_ here spanked me in milady's kitchen!" Here he nodded fiercely at a sooty-faced Holmes, seated across from me and unshaven, clad in striped wool shirt, grimy jacket and trousers, and sporting a ship captain's helmet—among us, the most masterfully disguised.

The detective, whose hawk stare had not once wavered from the various bustlings and festivities of the pub, glanced calmly at the Colonel and condescended a thin smile. "I wish," he spoke of a completely disjointed topic, "that Ms. Adler were here. She would have worked magic with her many costumes and acting skills. The case would have been solved already."

I blinked, thunderstruck at his ready admission of Madam Irene's superior skills—not to mention his tender, raw sentiments towards her.

Moriarty, whom I would have suspected eager to pounce cruelly upon Holmes's wishy-washy affections, instead nodded in dreamy accord. "Aye. I can't say I was fond of leaving Mrs. Hudson behind, either—despite the dangers of being here." He gnawed on the end of the unlit cigarette in his mouth, trying to make use of it, for his true self detested smoking nearly as much as I did. Holmes, on the other hand, dragged luxuriously on his cigarette, still queerly smiling. Looking remarkably like Ms. Adler, the absent personage on whom he lavished praise.

"Ah, _I _see," Moran snapped, taking these innocent remarks as indirect further attacks upon his negligence of espionage. "Doesn't matter to any of you, then, that I wrenched secrets to and from the Russian government on the matter of Afghanistan's ownership, in the mere guise of native dress, as the most feared double agent in the British and Russian empires! _Does_ it, James?" Again he shot his employer and friend a challenging glare. "After all, that was over nine years ago, and credentials requite renewal, eh?"

Shocked that one of Moriarty's employees dared such insubordination, Todd and Smiley, dressed as semi-respectable train coachmen, exchanged wide-eyed stares and shifted weight on their bar stools, making them creak.

The silence that ensued—if a lapse in conversation amidst dish-clashing, jug clinking, roaring laughter, bagpipe playing, and ungodly cursing could be considered silence—was unbearable. Primarily because Moriarty had not said a word after the remonstrance of his best friend, and was instead gazing at Sebastian Moran in a manner that would have encouraged me never to turn down my gaslight at night again. His head, yes, was wavering like a cobra's. "I think, Sebastian," he breathed at last, "that you _still _fancy danger." Eyes gleaming with murder.

An azure challenge returned. Both met set their jaws. Holmes shrugged at the tension between best friends and returned to his inspection of the tavern. Moran appeared as though he were on the brink of lowering his eyes in submission. But not quite.

Another silence. Sway, sway, went Moriarty's head. My own head spun.

Finally Moran himself broke the conversational hiatus. He turned abruptly and barked with flawless Cockney rudeness, as though to flaunt his impeccable acting skills, at the promiscuous bar proprietress known as Lola Smith. "Hoy, _you_ there! What's a poor bloke ta do fer some bloomin' _ale_ round 'ere?"

Miss Smith, no doubt informed of our undercover activities, tossed a quick wink his way and then screeched with the perfect surliness of a stranger in Whitechapel, " 'Old your 'orses, luvvie, your pints is _comin'_!" She produced a large mug of pale gold liquid, suspended under a barrel tap, to prove it. "How many, then?"

At this point, with, it seemed to me, much exaggeration, she slammed the mug in question down in front of a great, black-cloaked fellow who had just seated himself at the bar. Even through the thick, dark woolen attire, he was plainly firm-built and raw-boned, and even from the ten-foot distance, a peculiar, salty stench emanated from his person.

I quickly covered my nose with my napkin. Holmes and Moriarty collectively turned and stared at the proprietress. I glimpsed the Professor's begrimed hands, under the table: They were weaving delicate little gestures—signals of some sort—and Smith was regarding them, from the direction of her gaze, closely. Suddenly, as though on cue, she turned to the cloaked man, who had made no effort to claim the mug set before him. " 'Ere now," she chided, "ye gonna take your own pint or do I need to drink it _meself_?"

The gentleman's big pale hands shoved the mug back at her defiantly jutted bosom, like hairless white serpents striking. Ale spilled on her shamelessly bared cleavage, and she let out an angry yelp, jumping back. "Watch your tongue, _hussy_," a deep yet breathless voice shot at her. A voice of flawlessly intoned King's English. "_I_ never ordered any ale. Drink the thing, then!" He stooped over lower in his seat, saying no more, as Lola made a show of wiping her . . . self . . . clean of spilled ale. She looked at us all then, when she was sure the cloaked gentleman was not watching, and gave one sharp nod.

" . . . That is most interesting," Holmes mumbled, shooting a raise of eyebrows at Moriarty.

The Professor made a grunting sound that could pass as a "Yes, I agree." "Those drinks be ours, lady," he then shouted in his own faux Cockney, gesturing, this time, quite visibly to the bar proprietress. "Bring six, to answer your question, an' six orders of fish 'n chips ta 'ccompany 'em. _Now_."

She took her cue again with the adroitness of a practiced spy, and hustled to our table with our drinks. "Watch him," was all she said, in a low husky voice, nodding at the cloaked man.

"I intend to," Holmes injected. "Well done, Miss Smith."

"How did you tell her to. . .?" I began, looking to Moriarty's hands.

"Sign language," he supplied quickly. "Taught Lola when she was a lass. Most effective for all subtle purposes."

"We learnt it too," Smiley piped in, beaming.

"Yeah," Todd chuckled, "so now the Professor knows how to boss us around in _two_ languages!"

Moriarty scowled at him.

"Where is Kat tonight?" Moran interrupted, taking Lola's hand to seize her attention. True concern surfaced on his face. "She has not performed over on the stage yet, and I am becoming aware that we are in the presence of danger . . ."

"That is most possible, Colonel," Holmes agreed, eyes locked on the cloaked figure. With maddening nonchalance, he snuffed his smoke.

"She sent word with one of those Baker Street urchins sayin' she were ill, and taking a rest in her flat," Lola explained. "She's far from the mire _we're_ all in, gennelmen, never fear." And then she withdrew to the bar, taking care to sidestep the cloaked man. A few moments later she returned, tight-lipped, with our dinners.

Moran, who had been standing in a position resembling eagerness for fisticuffs, finally seated himself between Moriarty and me. Between, perhaps, his past and his present. A scraggly old bar tabby cat sauntered up the sullen Colonel, encoiling its tail between his army-booted ankles. The cantankerous feline reminded me of the grouchy lost pet of Martha Liverston, 7-year-old daughter of Andrew Liverston, the kidnapped coin press mechanic who had been forced to help Moriarty in a long-ago sovereign forgery scheme. The memory of the "Small Client" case, of myself clambering upon the roof of little Martha's house to entice Mrs. Whiskers or Whatever-Her-Name-Was and her half dozen kittens down off the roof (while Holmes and little Miss Liverston busied themselves on the aspects of the _real_ crime at hand), forced a chuckle from me despite the morbid situation in which we were buried. "Here, kitty," I cooed, offering the bewhiskered intruder a nip of my fish and chips. Todd rolled his eyes, but Smiley grinned and joined me, offering half a cod fillet to the tabby. Sebastian was a bit less congenial. His lapis glare snapped down upon his furry assailant, as the cat lodged its claws into his tweed trousers and began kneading them like a scratching post. In two seconds, he slipped his legs underneath the tabby's downy underbelly and flung it off him. The cat landed on its feet, doubled back, bristled, and hissed its vengeance at us all, perhaps thinking Marrow and myself conspirators who lured it into ease while Moran attacked (a role I certainly was not eager to play with our friend Jack should we discover him later that evening). We all stared at the furballed misanthrope.

It hissed again.

Sebastian leaned forward and hissed back—until little beads of spittle flew from between his jaws. His eyes widened to blue banshee-screaming baubles.

Then the tabby ran away. Quite promptly.

Moriarty, whom I had thought was not paying attention, suddenly crowed with laughter. It made me jolt. "You'll get Lola Smith quite vexed with you if you give St. Whiskers internal bleeding, Sebastian," he chortled, adjusting his eyepatch over his nearsighted, monocle-deprived right eye.

"I don't care," his Chief-of-Staff snapped back. "I've fought _enough_ savage striped cats in _India_ to earn one bloody evening in a tavern _without_ claws digging into my leg!"

"You may yet fight your tiger tonight, Colonel," Holmes drawled, sipping his ale. He snuffed another lit cigarette, the smug gaze of both the noncommittal window shopper and the determined hunter in those steel gray eyes. "That's our man at the bar, directly—and, I think, _deliberately_—within our eyesight."

"Deliberately?" Moriarty queried, remarkably mildly for what I, in horror, realized was being suggested. "A trap, then? And an associate nearby to do the _real_ damage to our too-nosy selves?"

"It is possible," the detective repeated noncommittally. "Keep an eye out."

"Holmes!" I gagged. "That man in the black cloak is _Jack the Ripper_?"

"Look closely, Watson. Look _closely."_

I obeyed. As if he sensed my undue curiosity, the man in question turned and looked directly at me. I could not feel my arms or legs—I could not feel anything at all—while pinioned under that gaze. It seemed so very familiar, the two blue eyes, so pale that they were transparent, and wide as though with continual vigilance, continual . . . lust . . . of some sort. But I could not verify any real recognition beyond that of my lurid imagination—for his face was entirely obscured by an oversized red theater mask, above a very ordinary looking, freshly-grown flaxen moustache. It was remarkably dramatic, that mask: remarkably. . . operatic, and very probably a product of the book and costume shop called the Reflector's Pond, owned by one James Stephen—a place where both murderers and performers would most likely peruse for goods. The thought of such a blatant connection to the career and daily activities of Irene Adler made me shudder. I had not considered, until that moment, the fact that the Ripper might actually be a _female_ disguised as a male. "Yes," I squealed, "I do believe it _is_ …him. Or at least . . someone with whom I'd never like to tangle after dark."

Presently the masked man's . . . person's. . . . face quivered under his mask. Wrinkles, premature for the age suggested by his physical stamina, collected along those ghoulishly bared eyes. He must be smiling at us.

Smiley began to quail so hard that our entire table shook; a confrontation with the man who was possibly his mother's killer, it seemed, was too much for his gentle spirit. Todd took his arm placatingly, and squeezed it.

"He stinks of the sea," Moran grumbled, not nearly as ruffled as I would have deemed wise. "Yes, the blighter _reeks_, whoever he is. I wonder if he deliberately cloaks himself in the odor to put off his Scotland Yard assailants. The smelliest tiger I ever did hunt."

As though he indeed heard this offhand insult, the cloaked and masked man loomed from his stool. The tabby cat that had been the target of Sebastian Moran's peevishness leapt upon the bar top and purred at him. Never taking his eye from our table, he seized it by the scruff of its neck and dodged out the door.

The Colonel, ever a man of action, shot from his seat to pursue him.

"No," Holmes spoke firmly, standing and blocking his path. "_Wait_. Trust me, Colonel. He does not mean to fly just yet. He means to _lure_ us unawares. Do not let him corner you alone outside, or he may overpower you."

Sebastian opened his mouth, fully prepared to object, most likely to brag about his undeniably remarkable combat prowess. But Moriarty stood then, too, and squeezed his friend's iron arm. His grip was far less sympathetic than Todd's gesture of kindness to Smiley moments earlier. Moran sighed, at last, and returned to his seat.

After a tense several minutes, Black-Cloak-And-Mask skulked back into the bar. Aside Lola Smith at her post, her posture tense, no one else in the bar gave notice to his departure or entry. _The fools!_

As he neared us, an audacity grew in his step, until his strides were as proud and broad as those of any righteous king. He was smiling again—those fishbelly white wrinkles were collecting around his eyes. I could not breathe, I could not breathe!

Then, at last, he was at our table: not near it, or behind it—_at_ it.

_Steady on, Watson! Breathe!_

Sebastian crouched forward in his seat, arm flying to the tiny pistol in his belt. There was that growling in his throat. Smiley whimpered, Todd trembled. Moriarty and Holmes sat ramrod straight, but no other physical facet betrayed unease. They looked, instead, both amused and tenacious. Holmes lit a third cigarette, as though suffering an annoying parlor guest, and Moriarty folded his arms across his chest, as though regarding a particularly disruptive math student. Not a word was spoken by anyone.

_Breathe!_

"Yes?" Holmes demanded, coldly, at last.

The man laughed then. Saints in heaven prevent any innocent soul the experience of hearing such a sound. A breathy, throaty wheeze, a giggling mockery of anything good or pure. It ended in a phlegmatic cough, one which he made no effort to conceal. Spittle caught on his moustache and flew over our dinners, and I fought the disgusted desire to shove my plate aside. His right hand wriggled inside its pocket.

Moran prepared to lunge, anticipating a weapon. None came.

Then, after the coughing was over, Jack the Ripper spoke. To one person alone. "I'll give you one thing, Mr. Holmes. You know what you're doing."

"Yes, my competence has been claimed before," Holmes shot curtly back. Gray eyes flashed daringly. "Woe be it to you . . . _Jack_."

The man before us neither claimed nor refuted the infamous nickname. Instead, his big, pale left hand crossed over to the wriggling right pocket, and withdrew, in a quick, subtle flash, something shrouded in sticky, dark red. It was a dusty orange color, and striped.

A cat's tail.

Collectively, our tablemates drew back.

"I am God and Satan," said Jack the Ripper, in the slow, level, certain tones of, in all perversion, a priest, concealing his new prize back into his pocket. "I am the antichrist, the Savior, the persecuted, the persecutor, the poisoned, the poisoner, the redeemer and damned. I lust for women but loathe them. I hate God but I do His dirty work. That's the fate I accept, the price I pay." He leaned close to my friend's face.

Never had I seen such barely-bottled fury on the features of Sherlock Holmes. He snuffed that third cigarette as a man bashing in a foe's brains.

"So, Mr. Holmes, Holmes, Holmes" concluded our private Satan, "there's but _one_ question that _really_ concerns _you_: What price will _you _pay for meddling, meddling, _meddling_ in _my_ affairs?"

I frowned: I had not noticed the telltale speech pattern before—the murderer's echolalia. But something even more extraordinary was occurring—his voice, its dialect and cadence, was metamorphosing into that of . . . a different person! "Or do ye plan ta _swing _me afore Oi rip me _next _'ore?" A rugged Cockney accent, and a frantic trill, replaced his cool, calm, insanely logical proper English. I would have thought it some kind of sick mockery if his mannerisms had not changed as well, from the chilly arrogant to the crude. Moriarty's eyes snapped up to convey suspicion to Holmes, and then, when he realized the detective was too engrossed in confrontation, to me. He, too, had noticed the strange personality alteration.

Jack the Ripper, or his alter personality, continued, "You jis' _troiy _an' catch me in 'ere, Mistah 'Olmes, while Oi sit meself over there by liddle Miss Smith, but yeh _won't _snag me afore she's gone the way o' her _tabby cat_! Women—they say anythin' except their prayers! Oi bet it jesssst n_ettles _ye, don't it? Knowin' with all your wits that ye _still _can't stop God's own work!" With this bizarrely brassy new challenge, our demonic quarry swaggered back to his seat, near the unaware Lola Smith, and we found ourselves hideously tied at the hands.

"Holmes?" I finally wheezed, turning to my old friend. "What do we do now?"

"We wait for our opportunity," he replied, suddenly, again, as airy as if we were discussing ancient Japanese tea recipes. Making me long for home and safety, and Mrs. Hudson's biscuits.

Holmes spoke again. "Another 'Boss' letter came—from our 'good fellow' over there at the bar. The Ripper boasts about mutilating animals as a child—claiming that women are on no higher a level than dumb beasts. This was clearly a gesture he meant to use to egg us on just now—yes, though he never once distinguished between being a henchman of the Ripper or the genuine article, I am now _certain _our masked man is the very same devil that we hunt."

"He does not merely hate prostitutes," Moriarty abruptly interjected. "The Paris autopsies, if we are to believe that they are the work of the same man, or of some sort of cohort, reveal an evolution from crass mutilation of internal organs, such as pulling out intestines and wrapping them around the victim's neck like. . . . like ribbons . . . to . . . to surgical removal of . . . external organs . . . which are uniquely female."

"_Surgical?"_ I felt as though I were being strangled by an invisible fist. "You mean this man could be a _doctor—_a doctor removing a woman's reproductive . . . ?"

"Yes." He twisted the end of his sharp, waxed moustache; were we not working so closely in consort with a criminal who seemed saintly compared to our new nemesis, the act of idle vanity would have struck me as disconcertingly wicked. "Again, pending that we place confidence in the autopsy reports of the Parisian detective, Inspector le Villard's, gendarmes."

Holmes drew a deep, considering breath. "What are the implications of this new discovery?"

Moriarty smiled tightly at him. "I think you already know the answer to that."

"I have a theory, Professor. But every theory must be tested by a reliable second opinion."

Moriarty's eyebrows rose; were he wearing his monocle, it would have toppled askance from his nose. "I do believe you just complimented me, Mr. Holmes. Very well. To me, this new facet of brutality implies that Jack the Ripper targets prostitutes only because they are _easy_ prey. No one accounts for them, except the despicable men who find them useful for a passing pleasure. Aside this issue of convenience, there is nothing singularly appealing about murdering them; he merely hates women in general—hates them for their capacity to reproduce, to perpetuate life on a planet that he sees as too hellish to which to subject men."

I shuddered.

"Indeed," Holmes rejoined. "Your conclusions have reached a similar ground as mine. But there is more. I have consulted the book _Psychopathia Sexualis, _penned by Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, brought to my attention by my brother Mycroft. Comparing the police reports to this resource has given me most disturbing conclusions: Our friend Jack mutilated his own . . . nether regions . . . as a child, for fear that he would have taken part in the offspring of women, or men doomed to be victimized by women. He may have feared that a woman gave him a venereal disease—perhaps he was unspeakably abused in a manner that made this possible, thus the source of his hatred of women. As you postulated, in his last letter, he claimed that he hates women for being the vessels that bring men into a world so miserable and full of sin."

"That would explain the rationale he just now conveyed," I murmured. " 'God and Satan,' and such."

Moriarty laughed bitterly. "How _conveniently _the brute forgets that conception and birth require that the _male_ sex—often, a specimen with _no_ honorable paternal intentions—plant the seed. It is obvious that in childhood he was devoid of a male nurturer and done grievous wrong by a female guardian, perhaps a mother. Perhaps also the person that gave him cause to wish to castrate himself, and whatever disease she may have passed to him."

"Does it strike anyone as imprudent that we are chatting indiscreetly about the very beast who is in our _midst_?" I objected through my teeth.

Holmes's gaze was ruminative. "My conjecture, Professor," he concurred, ignoring, as usual, my protests for caution, " is that he had no modicum of a childhood—periods of solitude punctuated by the awful thrill of drunken, and brutal guardians—brutal to an extent that none of us can imagine, yes, brutality into which I still must delve to understand what makes our hellish quarry tick—and unfeeling bystander kin."

"Brutal guardians? Unfeeling kin? Ah, Mr. Holmes," Moriarty said, almost as if he did not intend to admit it aloud. "That _I_ _already _understand." His eyes were distant—and strangely pained.

"How could you understand?" I blurted without thinking.

The Professor recoiled; those cold silver eyes, unsettling in their ability to extract much, but divulge little, focused on me and dared me to poke at his secret wounds. "_I just do_," he hissed.

And I most certainly dropped the matter, then and there. "Sorry."

His ensuing sneer could have well fit a Hogarthian _Marriage a la Mode_ scene—sardonic yet grave. "No harm done, doctor," he said.

Holmes looked directly at his once-mentor and confidante then—at a man that he had long since discovered he had never really known at all. Unlike mine, the detective's scrutinizing gaze readily peeled the evasive shroud from Moriarty's features. "_None_, Professor?" he asked. "None at _all_?" Silence. Then, graciously, or so it appeared, my friend released his arch nemesis from his scrutiny. "Fair enough. I am sure that Mrs. Hudson is a more suitable candidate to be trusted with these . . . gruesome secrets of yours. Is she not?"

I was vaguely cognizant that my friend's kindness actually bore a venomous undercurrent.

Moriarty squirmed. "Just leave it be, Mr. Holmes," he implored, lowering his eyes. For some reason his face bore an exceedingly guilty expression.

"The echolalia and personality shifts," Moran put in softly, drawing us, I am sure deliberately, back to the relevant topic of discussion. Somehow, discussions of the worst serial killer in the history of England were far less dangerous than the ground on which Holmes had just tread. "Don't forget that our cloaked intruder exhibited those peculiarities. A . . .female acquaintance of mine . . . her father shares the same symptoms of psychosis as this man. Echolalia in his speech triggers this . . . alteration in an otherwise completely reputable personality, and the onset of homicidal behaviors. There seems to be some external cue . . . usually blood."

"The . . . cat," I supplied, forcing back a gag.

"Yes," Sebastian nodded. "The doctors diagnosed it as schizophrenia in the girl's father, but somehow, to me, it seems insufficient. Especially considering he was released from hospital custody as 'cured' so soon after his diagnosis. He rubbed elbows with enough nutcases there to last him a lifetime, and in my opinion, he should have _stayed _in their company."

"And do you believe that man at the bar—our Ripper—is in fact the father of that . . . 'female acquaintance?' " Holmes sharply queried.

"No," the Colonel stiffly countered, through pursed lips. "Her father is not in England. He is . . . abroad."

Holmes fell silent. "There is one more unsettling aspect to the recent Ripper letter. Further proving the religious perversion of our culprit."

"What is that, Holmes?" I croaked.

"The letter was signed, 'from Hell.' "

" . . . Oh. Oh . . . my."

Moriarty sniffed, irritated, rather than repulsed, by the information that Holmes had initially delivered. " 'Vessels of misery and sin,' my ass," he archly grumbled. " Jack the Ripper _obviously_ never knew Marie Hudson."

"No, obviously not. Goodness can do wonders for an evil man, and the marks of it are not present upon _that _particular evil man." Holmes fixed a hard, uncompromising look on his intellectual peer, again taking his gaze off our current quarry and placing it upon his usual prize.

The Professor smirked, reading his former pupil's thoughts—this time he was prepared for the attack. "And _this _evil man?" He spread his arms wide, indicating himself.

Holmes considered the question, truly considered it, for a long stretch of silence. But he never answered—for something aroused his attention. "_There_," he hissed under his breath, his languid posture snapping erect, a foxhound on the fresh trail. Nothing pointed in the direction of his object of interest, save his eyes. "Walking towards us, now! _Don't look now_, he'll _see _you! But I believe I've spotted an added complication."

"Holmes," I protested in a mumble, "go easy, we are in disguise! We are lowlife ruffians, for all these people-–except the Ripper himself--know!"

"_What _complication?" Moriarty snapped, somehow less inclined to argue with my friend.

At that moment, a portly shadow descended over our table. Only Holmes was swift enough to cover his visage by clutching his brow from a feigned headache. The rest of us gawked in self-incrimination at our encroacher. Moriarty, at least, had the nerve to muster a demonic glare. "Oh," he chirped, with false congeniality, "_that _complication."

To my dismay, the criminal did not even attempt to conceal his tell-tale uppercrust enunciation and Irish accent. He obviously knew we were _that _far caught.

I at last looked up at the intruder, a fat, short man with a shock of poorly kempt blond hair and skin sunbaked from many years in Eastern climes. He was dressed in a manner startlingly highbred for the seedy environs, with a shiny beaver top hat that he was too rude to doff, and an ostentatious gold pocket watch. The brass buttons of his vestcoat threatened to burst about his stout, greedy midriff. His face looked like it had been stuffed with too many marshmallows, the cheeks puffing out like those of an angry blowfish as he sucked mercilessly on his cigar. His bristly Anglo-Saxon moustache twitched—however comical, I recognized it as a gesture of aggression. "Professor Moriarty, isn't it?" he greeted the tensed Irish-Egyptian in a snooty, nasal baritone. "The 'criminal genius' who failed me miserably in my Indian schemes to trap the fortunes of a filched Big Ben?"

Todd and Smiley simultaneously went taut. I could almost hear the taller lad's heart thundering—or perhaps it was my own—as he and the shorter lad reached slowly for their pockets, and, I presumed, their pistols.

"How diplomatic you are, President Ames," our devilish companion fired back, enmeshing his fingers coolly, as though he, rather than our merciless uncoverer, commandeered the situation. But I saw the perspiration gathering in unseemly wet spots about his sullied shirt collar. His own moustache, an austere, black-knife opposite to the bristling mass of our encroacher, quivered. "It's not exactly as if I profited from the scam any more than _you_ did. But don't tell me you harbor old grudges."

"Very much so," the fat, corrupt corporate executive rumbled. "And that goes for _you, too_, my dear _meddling_ Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Funny I should see you two 'sworn enemies' at the same table! A conspiracy between you and the Professor all along, was it, to make me a _laughing stock_?" With this, the highly imaginative President reached down and grabbed Holmes's concealing hands from his face. "Hullo, yes, I _thought_ it was you—smelled more than _one_ rat, I did! And I see you still harbor your pathetic excuse for an assistant!" He gestured at me like a disgruntled, portly Russian Rasputin, sinister and sneakily judgmental. I drew up indignantly as he continued. "Give it up, lads! _None _of you fooled me in these ridiculous disguises! I am practiced at artifice of _my_ own sort—I can recognize it in others!"

Holmes glowered and remained silent. But he wasn't looking at Ames. He was looking past him.

My eyes roved desperately in the same direction. I glimpsed our three thin followers—all grew closer and closer to our table, and to that of the masked man presumed to be the Ripper himself. They all wore long, oversized waistcoats, were the same slight size and height, and, under their matching derbies, were a curious hodgepodge of hair shades—one blond, the second a difficult-to-place brown-auburn, the third with hair like the blackest of raven feathers. This third individual, to my further disconcertion, was masked. Warm-Brunette-Hair seemed to commandeer all three, gesturing them closer to our environs. He pointed to President Ames, and then to some fixed place in the shadows behind us, to which Masked-Raven-Hair quickly darted. I began to sweat profusely.

I turned to Sebastian Moran, perhaps the most savage of our entire company, for a comforting bestial growl or clenched fist. To my horror, he was absent from his seat. And to my returning confidence, he was standing directly behind President Ames—the predatory glint in those lapis eyes made me shudder despite the stifling heat inside the tavern, and despite my gratitude that, for once, Sebastian was on _our _side. Moriarty cast his assassin a flicker of eyes and a barely perceptible nod—permission. And then the Colonel spoke. "What's afoot here? Why, _Gregory Ames_!" he rather roared, clapping an apparent old acquaintance on the back. "You old _cad_! How long has it been since you were last in India, eh? Since you came to watch me bag that fat lot of Bengal tigers with your wife and daughters? Ho ho_, ha,_ a man after me own heart, taking his family to watch _butchery_ for some larks!"

Ames nearly leapt out of his skin in surprise. It did little to ameliorate his vindictive mood. "It has been _far too long_, with far too _few_ favors, my _dear _Colonel Moran," he fumed, "to ingratiate yourself with me _now_. Why, have you forgotten your failed efforts to help the corrupt sects of the Indian nobility and the Professor here to conspire to catch Big Ben—yes, Moran, I know it was you who contacted Prince Hassan's treacherous little advisor about your friend Moriarty's exploits? For do the papers not say that you made India 'too hot to handle you?' "

Sebastian only brayed a harsh laugh, admirably blending into the lowlife din of the tavern. He slapped his thighs, tiptoeing around the question. "Ames, you're a stick in the mud tonight!" No, _his_ moustache did _not_ quiver.

"I merely have an _agenda_," the President hissed, black little eyes sparkling dangerously at Holmes and Moriarty—and myself. "One I intend to enact in the next couple of minutes. I'm sure, good sirs, that the underlings of London would _love_ to be introduced to the man who put them in jail and had their friends hung, _and _to the man who has lately been failing them as their crime boss: yes, a marvelous _double-header_!" He clicked his heels in a terse gesture of leave, turning to divulge our identities to the larger crowd. A man, perversely, of his word.

I turned to scope our other intruders; all three of the waistcoated men, now, were nowhere in sight. _Good God_.

Sebastian's gaze followed mine for a lightning strike instant, then glimpsed something, again, behind me. But he was still smiling, still laughing. "I haven't a deuced _clue_ as to what you're yammering about, old sport, but perhaps first you could indulge me in watching my demonstration of a dance I saw a sheik perform once, ah, way back in '79. Come, come! India is our mutual home away from home, after all!"

"No interest," came the brusque reply, over Ames's shoulder, as he prepared to raise his voice.

Holmes went rigid. Moriarty let out a strangled noise and glared wide-eyed at Moran. Todd and Smiley retrieved their guns into full sight. And I continued to sweat.

"And those darling _belly dancers_ fancy it, too!" came the Colonel's final, loudly-blurted plea. His sly sneer, and the way he smugly reset his pince-nez on his muzzle, told me in advance that he'd struck a chord. "Turns 'em _right_ on, it does!"

This actually caused the President, apparently a womanizer on top of all other transgressions, to pause. "Oh?" he asked, vaguely interested. "How do the first steps go?"

Moran cast a cocky smirk at Moriarty; the criminal genius's rigid posture eased minutely—enough to express his confidence in his Chief-of-Staff—and that nefariously fetching Cheshire Cat grin of his crept upon his face. It was clear that the two of them had something quite utilitarian—and effective—planned to lauch upon the rambunctious Mr. Ames. "Go ahead, Sebastian," the Professor granted, with a positively royal flourish of the hand, once again enacting that dumbfounding skill of his to make a desperate situation appear entirely under his control. "Show our . . . guest."

Holmes's falcon stare fixed upon the unfolding scene. "Watson," he murmured—somehow, incredibly, throwing his soft voice into my ear without leaning any closer toward me. Perhaps in his younger days he had been a ventriloquist: It would not have shocked me. "Watson, your army revolver: be ready. Our foes are numerous."

Indeed, as I looked beyond our table and regarded the broader scene, rather than its miniscule details, for the first time, I realized a horde of burly, waitstcoated men slowly approaching our table—the left vest pocket of every waistcoat embroidered with an imposing crimson coat of arms and the words "Ames Corporation." We were surrounded, as it were, by the greedy, vindictive little bounder's goons. Suddenly our three black-clad gentlemen—even Jack the Ripper himself—were of little consequence. I reached for my vestcoat pocket, and the loaded revolver inside it. I waited.

Sebastian Moran balked deliberately, feigning memory loss. "Well, I ah . . . I believe it's more becoming on a half-naked brown girl than on a strapping chap like me . . ." He stumbled about, as though looking to the floor for invisible patterns that might help him recall the fictitious dance steps.

"Oh, come, now!" Ames grumbled, fat face gone florid. He smacked his tubby hands on his thighs like a cantankerous toddler, reminding me vaguely of an older, more sinister Prince Albert. "You irk me, then you pacify me, then you try my patience once more? Which will it be, Colonel? Show us or don't!"

"Oh, _dash_ it, man, _alright_, let me think . . . um, here's the first step . . . and the second . . ." The heavy game hunter, the Fierce Shikari, the bagger of tigers and men alike, was flailing all over the place like a disjointed, drunk mannequin. I had never seen so absurd a sight; nor had Ames, or his cronies, who looked on with a mixture of stupidly gawking amusement and entrancement. For all his apparent blustering, Moran was achieving what he wanted: He had their attention fully diverted. He had our present foes lulled into a state of false confidence, and disarmament.

And in this time, while he flopped ostentatiously about, Moriarty and Smiley Marrow had slowly inched from their seats and melted into the crowd of fellow pub-goers, who had fallen silent and vigilant as the Ames brutes closed in around our table. Among them was a very white-faced Lola Smith. I could not see whether our "friend" Jack was still seated at his bar stool. I would have thought the Professor and his henchmen were abandoning us, but Todd O'Toole stayed, and, under the table, I could hear the faint clicking of his pistols being cocked. A hungry glint shone in the lad's hard little brown eyes, and his jaw, littered with beard stubble, set pugnaciously; for the first time I could see why the Professor had thought the stout ex-pirate a worthy employee.

"Here's three," Sebastian was trumpeting, doing a particularly lavish hindside-wriggle about the table. Some of Ames's well-dressed thugs actually giggled and applauded.

Then Holmes breathed, "It's coming, Watson," and every muscle in my body went electric. I cocked my revolver, too, though I doubt my eyes were as dangerous looking as Todd's. It had been a long time since I had seen real combat.

Ames and his men collected in a huddling mass—a small, manageable cluster—about Moran, who had paused for dramatic effect. Or so they thought. But I knew better, for in that instant, my once-friend turned to me and pierced my soul with his azure gaze, a gaze that had in a flash turned from domesticated to savage. Suddenly Todd's glare, or any glare that I might conjure, paled next to his thirsty bestiality. And he was _smiling_. I knew then what Holmes meant when he said it was "coming."

"Watch _this_, John," he scoffed, out of the side of his mouth, as though a child boasting conspiratorially about how far he could make a stone skip across a creek. Except for his utterly demonic face. Then he turned back to Ames, bowed his head and arched up on one muscular leg. "And the fifth goes . . ."

Then it came. Lightning would be inefficient description: for it came from all sides of us.

" . . . Like _this!"_ A possessed samurai, Sebastian Moran let out a shriek, flashed upward and thrust his risen leg into Ames's ample belly. The President went sprawling and winded on his back. His many cohorts roared in protest. The bar customers howled and fled to corners and under tables.

Todd stormed from his seat and flung our table out from under us, knocking it over onto Ames and three of his thugs. He threw himself on top of the overturned table; his portly size rendered them firmly pinioned.

Then Moriarty was there behind the thugs, his walking stick turned swordstick cracking the skulls of or otherwise stabbing any whom he caught unawares, his monocle gleaming with his sudden, stealthy attacks. His utter silence and flat-faced composure while performing such lethal acts rendered him even more sinister, even more formidable, than his wailing, snarling Chief of Staff. It occurred to me that I had never seen him seriously engaged in battle, in his true dark element; I had only seen him at the brink of laughable fits and temper tantrums when some offbeat plot of his had gone awry. Tonight I saw there was far more danger locked inside James Moriarty than a capricious, childish, "odd little man," as I had branded him to many a client of Holmes. And now, watching him slaying foes with the precise, effortless thrust and parry of a champion swordsman, I was actually _glad _that I had underestimated the Napoleon of Crime before.

Smiley appeared behind the Professor; his gangling arms enmeshed thugs here and there like rope cord as he flung them to the ground and punched them harder than I would have credited his mild temperament capable. But these men _were_ getting in the way of capturing his mother's murderer.

As for Holmes, he let out a crow of "tally ho!" and threw himself into the crowd of remaining bounders, who were far from giving up to a cluster of apparent beggars. His body bowed to his whim as he alternated between sharp, staccato boxing blows—the "gentleman's straight left," he would call it—and long, limber Japanese wrestling attacks. "Come, Watson," he cried over his shoulder.

I joined him and took aim at the fallen men who were rising to attack again—at the men that Todd could no longer hold to the ground. My hands trembled at the thought of killing, however, and I held back, letting Sebastian and his poison darts do the dirty work. "You're too _soft,_ John!" the tiger killer seethed, plunging back into the larger fray. It was an insult that I, a man meant to heal rather than wound, readily accepted. Especially in the light of the butchery in Whitechapel by the hands of the fiend we had just met.

Presently Holmes leapt on top of the bar, sending a squawking Lola Smith running to the back kitchens for her own pistol. He spilled the untouched jug of ale, seeking that same butcher, the drink's unwilling recipient.

The black-cloaked, masked Ripper suspect was gone. Utterly vanished. It was better to lose him, at least, than having him return to our table.

Holmes's face darkened amidst the din. "Why the _blazes_ . . .?" he growled, tossing his mop of red-orange hair from his eyes.

Then the next antagonist appeared. I could scarcely conjure in my muddled imagination whether this new force was in allegiance with the Ripper, or with Ames, or with neither. All I knew was that he shared their hate of my detective friend.

For he sprang atop the bar from the shadows behind our now-overturned table, clad all in black shirt, trousers, and thin polished boots, a bandana reminiscent of a Japanese ninja obscuring most of his pale green face. There was a tiny black pistol poised for discharge in his left hand.

Holmes was looking around the room—he didn't see his new foe.

"_Holmes!"_ Moriarty and I shouted in near unison, from our separate battle positions in the roiling tavern, while veritable war still raged around us.

Holmes turned, too late to stop him, gray eyes widening in shock and, even more, in anger that he could be caught off guard by an unknown foe. "_Damn _you . . . " he began, coming at the slim midnight-clad man, intending to go down with a fight.

The new assailant cocked his pistol. "Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," a high tenor voice announced.

"_That's my line, buster_!" an unmistakably American accent and slang rang out in interruption—a female voice—and the three waistcoated, derbied visitors who had been watching our table during the transaction with Ames, flashed up to the bar and surrounded the pseudo ninja assassin. The speaker—the leader, with the auburn-brown head—ripped off his derby and let his bountiful burnt brown curls tumble down to his hips.

The entire tavern paused for an instant to gasp and gawk.

And Madame Irene Adler, honey-gold eyes royally blazing, pointed a hand at the black-clad predator and shouted again in that ringing, roaring American stage voice, "_That's our man, Alline! Get him!"_

_"Irene?" _Holmes gasped, the rapture on his face ludicrously unsuited to the situation. It was the first time I had ever seen him take his eyes off of a foe—even for an instant. "Good God, what fortune!"

She grinned back at him with the beauty of the Madonna and the wicked joy of Lillith.

Raven-hair, her first comrade, slung off his derby and became a "she" as well—the notorious criminal beauty Alline Christopher—and drew a long sinewy leather shape from her belt. She cracked it into the air, her devilish whip, knocking the pistol from the assailant's fingers.

The black-clad villain cursed and dove for the weapon, but Blond-hair seized it and tossed it to Irene, allowing Holmes to lunge at his new attacker at last.

"Thank you, Marie," the diva chirped, smiling approvingly at our third hero of the hour, who was dissembling her fair canary hair and revealing herself to be none other than . . .

_"Mrs. Hudson!" _I wailed over the din. "What the _deuce_ . . .?"

"_What larks_!" screeched Lola Smith, while doing her best to take out enemies from behind the bar with her gun. "She's a corker fit for my Bobby!"

Moriarty himself had advanced to my front-row seat account of the feminine intervention, his eyebrows flying up and his jaw quite literally dropping to his chest. "_Marie!"_ he blurted, a wild mix of shock, admiration, and chastisement in his voice. The blood of his foes was sprayed all over his disguise, rendering his protectively disapproving glare all the fiercer. Further scoldings were poised on his lips.

"Don't even _start,_ James!" she snapped back, seizing a mop leaning against the bar and brandishing it high. She rushed into battle with angelic cheeks ablaze, clipping a thug who was about to knife Smiley's back unawares. "I promise I won't get in the way," she threw breathlessly over her shoulder, the rigors of the fight, of her wildly flying hair and glittering pale eyes, rendering her far more fey than seraphim. "In any case, I've already decided."

He watched her, his dismay turning to worried appreciation.

"No arguing with that," I informed him hastily, recocking my own pistol. "Trust me."

"I know," he bleakly observed, then whirled to face the bar again, where Holmes and the black-clad villain were locked in a fierce martial arts war, hand-to-hand, no weapons.

There was still no room for anyone to intercede. My friend growled and gritted and grappled like a demon; I had never seen him so infuriated with a foe since battling Moriarty himself at Reichenbach Falls. It appeared as though our new assailant were already losing, anyway—he was a much smaller man.

"Problem," Moran wheezed, stinking of sweat, rushing up to us. "Todd and Smiley, and even our new warrior princesses, aren't going to be able to hold these brutes at bay much longer, especially if you want to try and track our disappearing mate, Jack. I see you've a _new_ friend." The hunter's lapis gaze wryly drank in the writhing black form of Holmes's combatant. He drew a dagger from his belt and licked his lips. "Shall I take care of it?"

"No." Moriarty grabbed his Chief of Staff by the wrist. "No, if he is affiliated with the Ripper, then sparing him for interrogation may be our means to a most justifiable end this night."

Moran obeyed, turning back to the center of the tavern, where six remaining thugs were beginning to gain the upper hand on the toiling warriors Todd, Smiley, Alline, and Marie. "If someone were to draw them out into Whitechapel Streets, where the East End police can see their shenanigans . . ."

"On it," Irene snapped, with a nod. She raised her hands like a possessed priest and shouted for her sisters in war. I would have much feared her were she an opposing war general during the Juwaki Campaign of my field medic years. "Marie, Todd, Smiley! Let's pull them outside and away from the real battle! Alline, go help the men!" She seized the Rippers' abandoned ale mug and flung it at the head of the biggest Ames thug, who was leering at, and who far outweighed, Todd. The blow dazed him a great deal, but angered him even more. He turned snarling upon her.

"_Good _little boy," she hissed, backing out the tavern's front door. "Follow _Mommy_!"

He roared and lunged at her. Ames, his comrades, and ours, including, to my great anxiety, Mrs. Hudson, followed. Within seconds, the tavern was humming with the silence of any extraneous noise beyond the current combat with the current foe. We, along with half the ordinary patrons still cowering behind their bar stools, watched in awe the efficacy of a brace of "weak little" women.

"Look out!" two more of those "fragile creatures," Lola Smith and Alline Christopher, suddenly screamed at the countertop.

But the black-clad would-be-assassin seized the moment, and our slowness, to aim a good sharp kick at Holmes's jaw, sending him flying backwards onto the bar table. He launched off of it and out the same door, escaping.

"_No_!" Holmes roared, flinging himself to his feet, staggering out the door behind our foe. "We must stop him! We _must_!"

I turned behind me as we departed, and spotted the odious Ames escaping the huntresses Irene and Marie, who had so absorbed the attention of the rest of the Blue Raven Tavern. He was sneaking out into the Whitechape l streets behind us, mounting a hansom near the bar's entrance. He bellowed at the driver to make haste. I prayed to God that he wasn't following us, but hadn't the time to observe the cab's direction, for my companions were much more physically fit than me—gazelles to my rhinoceros when it came to running. And our quarry was something of a cheetah to boot.

"Holmes," I huffed and puffed. "I beg you, the motorcar!"

"Capital, Watson," he barked, veering to the street curb just past the President's carriage. Moran and Miss Christopher darted to his side.

Moriarty brought up the rear of our hunting party, but his capacity to draw conclusions, and to speak, still seemed quicker than those of the lot of us. "_Damn_," he breathed. "It's been sabotaged."

It was indeed: The left rear wheel of Holmes's precious Benz was entirely ripped from its socket, several of the wooden spokes splintered into a thousand pieces.

"But who . . . ?" I began.

"Our quarry," Moran spat over his shoulder, already hot in pursuit of his new prey. "In case we were to try and catch him, he facilitated his own hasty retreat! But let's thwart him, shall we?"

I peered down the street, where a solitary black-clad figure just barely visible dotted the dank areas not quite reached by the gaslights. Still reachable.

"I should love to hunt an assassin tonight," Miss Christopher trumpeted, following him closely. Her whip made sinister, serpentine traces as it wriggled in the air behind her. "Come, gentlemen!"

"You heard the lady!" cried Holmes, and the three of us remaining men sallied forth to catch our crook.

I have regretted many times since that day not looking behind us one more time to see the progress of President Ame's carriage. But it is spilled milk, as they say, and I am getting ahead of myself. Much remains to tell before this particular regret of mine was to come to pass . . .

We chased our man for quite some time, until my old Afghanistan leg wound, and the jezail bullet wound in my shoulder, sharply complained, and my stifling waistcoat grew chilly wet with perspiration. Still I plunged ahead behind the lither forms of Holmes, Moriarty, Moran and Christopher, until we exited the East End entirely. Our assailant-turned-quarry made a sharp turn out of the alleys and into a broader street. He leapt into the sole transport out in such early morning hours—a milk wagon.

Holmes cursed and engaged in a harder sprint, accidentally shedding his deerstalker, the one item of genuine guise that he had worn. The tenacious Moriarty, remarkably fit for a man at the brink of 40 years, trampled my friend's signature hat underfoot as he followed. Then Moran passed me, drawing a long, sleek weapon from his belt: an air rife. He shouted to Miss Christopher, and she ducked, as though in perfect synchronization, as he aimed and fired. The weapon's discharge was an almost soundless hiss that barely disturbed the quiet of the early morning streets. His master shot failed him, however, for the first time in his career; the sleek, black-clad tiger in question dodged, and the Colonel's wrath was instead spent on a few burst glass milk bottles. White liquid sprayed in our faces, and now it was Moran's turn to shriek obscenities at our quarry.

Moriarty directed his predatory rage more practically than his fitful Chief-of-Staff. "_Stop the wagon_!" he screamed at the driver, flailing his arms. "You've a stowaway in your wagon!"

The cart driver whirled, eyes wide, face crumpled in shocked rage—though more at the destruction of his merchandise than at the commands of the Professor. "What the bloody 'ell ye tryin' to _do_?" he roared at us all, a thick, rural Scottish accent making the words all the fiercer; our bedraggled costumes, certainly, did not make us appear to be gentlemen for whom compliance was prudent. "Drunken _lunatics_!" He pulled back on the reigns of his already-plodding Clydesdale and it whinnied in accord, slowing substantially, but too harried by the noise to stop.

Behind his black mask, still hiding among the bottles, our prey's emerald eyes narrowed with unabashed hate. He cowered deeper into the liquid merchandise, seeking an exit aside the flanked back of the cart.

Holmes and Christopher simultaneously took advantage of this sluggishness and leapt into the transport. Moriarty and Moran took example and followed. I was, here, at a quandary. Christopher turned to my desperately clambering form and slashed her whip out at me. "Grab the end!" She prompted.

I tried—as best I could, but my arms and legs were too short to oblige. She stretched her arm out harder. At last I grasped the whip, and she reeled me into the cart. The clamor of more broken glass drew my eyes to the front of the wagon. The black-clad man was hurling milk jugs at Holmes and Moriarty, who attempted at intervals to gang upon and tackle him. So far, he was winning; white and red mingled as hurtling glass hit its mark upon the faces, chests, legs and shoulders of London's two geniuses. Still they advanced. Inspired by their tenacity, I joined them and earned some cuts of my own. Christopher's whip attacked and broke the bottles nearest the grasp of our quarry, stalling his attacks. The poor milkman continued to implore us to stop, trying to get his agitated Clydesdale to halt entirely so that he might throw us off his transport. He remained unsuccessful.

The path grew rougher still, and Brompton Road opened up to our south. Moran tried to reload his air rifle and get a clean shot at our qaurry, but the rocky path made such an endeavor impossible. We were charging through the stately Kensington Park, but at this ungodly hour, no comforting presence, no children romping and shouting bell-like laughter, dotted the grass beneath Victoria's glorious monuments—no living souls peopled beneath the Gothic spires of the Prince Albert Memorial, or the redbrick expanse of Albert Hall. Only the Holy Trinity Church was alit, as any comforting religious refuge—but there was more to it this night. A slow procession of armed Royal Guards surrounded two women who sauntered to a carriage at the church entrance: a carriage gilded to such an extent that it seemed to have leapt from the age of French Rococo. One woman was young, the other so shrouded in black mourning that her age was indiscernible, aside a cane that she leaned upon to aide her in her stroll. No doubt the affects of Rheumatism . . .

No. It couldn't be!

And yet . . .

We passed the carriage presently, while milk bottles were still being hurled at my companions, while the golden transport's inhabitants mounted. Two white horses snapped to a rapid canter and quickly caught up with the vehicle of the hapless Scottish milkman. One steed was extremely familiar . . . from a recent case in which Miss Christopher had, in fact, been key. It was Shoscom Prince: the Royal Horse.

The young woman was one of the Princesses of England.

And the black-shrouded dowager inside that carriage . . . was none other than . . .

As though following my distracted train of attention, the black-clad renegade relinquished his dairy-based assault, drew a knife from his belt, sliced a hole in the canvas wall of the wagon, and leapt upon the very Royal Carriage in question.

"My God!" I wheezed, as though my explanation were needed. "The _Queen_!"

For the first time in our acquaintance, Colonel Moran was entirely taken aback. "The _what?"_

"_Professor_!" Holmes bypassed my shock to appeal to his peer.

"Right behind you!" The criminal hissed, again in that bizarre manner of flawless communication in which neither of them required actually spoken words.

And then, together, detective and criminal followed quarry to the top of Queen Victoria's Royal Carriage.

What followed is a blur for me to this day. I can only endeavor to glean some petty details of the rapid, nauseating rush of action.

Another presence loomed, faster than the milk wagon, at the pace of the Royal Carriage—President Ame's transport! Leaning out the window was the very swine who had already tried to do us in, his jowls locked into a bestial snarl. He was aiming something dark and gleaming at the three figures grappling on the roof of the Royal transport—a pistol!

"Holmes!" I wailed. "Oh, Christ, Mercy! Look _out_!"

My friend turned in the direction of my pointed hand, at the carriage and its maddened passenger, grabbed Moriarty's arm and forced him to duck. A bullet sailed over their heads, and Ames cursed bitterly, reloading. Moriarty stood first, cursing back, the filth and hostility in his language easily rivaling that of Ames's.

The carriage driver, a poor hapless fellow in a gilt frock coat, turned wide eyed to gasp at the assemblage of combaters. "Who in God's Name . . ?" he began. The horses, much like the milkman's Clydesdale, ran wild. And one of them was a race horse.

I looked to the ground between our wagon, rapidly losing ground to the two speedy carriages of the Queen and President, and contemplated jumping it too . . . even though I knew I would never make it.

"Don't." Moran read my mind, pulling me back with one of his iron arms. He still stank of perspiration; indeed, he was panting with his efforts, though the alert Miss Christopher, beside us, seemed as cool and refreshed as if she had taken a ride in the country. "Ames is a bad aim—no pun intended. He will merely be a nuisance, not a true threat. We must not meddle, or our added weight will cave in the carriage roof and imperil the Queen and Princess."

"Not _my _weight," our lean female companion chirped, almost, I discerned, cheerfully, and with that she had disengaged herself from the milk truck, and leapt, too, upon the carriage roof.

Our black-clad prey tried to bolt, then; the force of his steps was enough to break the thin, white-painted roof of the Royal transport, and down half his body trunk vanished, into the doubtlessly startled Royal Compartment. He let out a scream then—a most unmanly, feminine shriek of rage.

Holmes seized the moment and pounced upon the captured man. There was a struggle, in which my friend pinioned his foe, much as he had pinioned Colonel Moran at Mrs. Hudson's kitchen countertop. But there was a silver flash in the black clad man's pocket, and out flashed an insidious dagger . . .

Lodging itself into Holmes's belly.

The prey dislodged his knife and ripped himself up out of his self-made trap, leaving a hole in the carriage roof. Christopher took him then, her whip cracking about his legs. She pulled it taught, drew her arm around his slender waist, and leapt off the Royal Carriage. Our prey was caught—but my wounded friend and his wicked peer were still the objects of President Ames's tenacious target practice.

I must have screamed then, and jumped off the milk truck; for I found myself on the unforgiving wet London pavement, our transport stopping several feet from us, with Sebastian bracing me from falling on my face. I was half-cognizant of Miss Christopher rushing towards me, ripping the mask from our quarry's face . . .

Katherine Ferrell was beneath that mask!

I gulped back a rush of bile. " . . . _You_?"

She glared at the ground, and said nothing.

"Scotland Yard!" my old army mate roared at the disgruntled wagon pilot, who had presently dismounted his damaged charge. There was something betrayed and broken in his voice, upon the unmasking of his fiancée. And I could hardly blame him. "Send for Scotland Yard, to detain a man named Gregory Ames! _Hurry_, man! That's the _Queen_ he's firing at!"

A white lie of sorts—for Ames, in his rage at Holmes and Moriarty, had not even registered the identity of the carriage's interior passengers—but it served the necessity of hurrying our circumstantial acquaintance from his cart and down the streets towards the Scotland Yard offices, wailing for help at every step.

"Now," said Sebastian in my half-numb ear, "we will return to the Tavern to retrieve Ms. Adler, Mrs. Hudson, Todd and Smiley, for I am certain that by now they have enabled the incarceration of Ames's cronies. There we shall enlist your Mr. Holmes's Baker Street Irregulars in helping us locate . . . what is left of our two brave friends."

"I do not like the sound of that," I said. I could not help but point a tremulous, condemning finger at the silent Katherine Ferrell. "She . . . she _stabbed_ him, Sebastian! Your fiancée!"

Kat's vengeful emerald eyes now flooded and spilled with fierce tears. "Oh, Jesus," she whimpered, low, in her throat. "But it's justified, it's right, it's for God to kill that man . . ."

Moran moved in front of her, shielded her, somber but willing to slit my throat, I knew, at her defense, even though she was speaking madness. _He_ spoke levelly. "And if we act quickly, Holmes may yet live. Holmes, and Moriarty, too."

" . . . I suppose that is true . . ."

"Right, then," Miss Christopher nodded. "I shall go on ahead of you two and find the girls and boys. After that, my work is done. Good evening, gentlemen!"

I could not help but reel at the continuing joviality in her voice in a place and time that toyed so closely with death. The hours to come would be dark indeed.

The following testimonial from the case that I have entitled _His Ardor _is derived (with some persuasion, I might add) from Holmes's private diary. I still shudder to tell of the events that proceeded in the presence of President Ames and Queen Victoria, and in my absence.

The two geniuses of London teetered like whirling dervishes atop the carriage of the monarch and her daughter, while the demonic Ames pursued. Holmes clung to his stomach, little rivers of thick red snaking out from between his fingers.

"Hold on, son!" Moriarty crowed, lurching towards his once-protégé. Over his shoulder, he tossed a treacherous look at the Ames carriage, dancing closer and farther from the royal transport, and at the man peering out the window, pistol still poised—and still firing. "_Damn you to hell's bowels, old man_!" he shrieked. "You'll _regret_ playing with _this _criminal!"

"We shall see about that! I shan't let go of you two until you are made _carcasses_!" Ames roared back, firing—and barely missing—the criminal's foot.

Moriarty yelped and clambered closer to Holmes, falling on top of him, shielding him. After resetting his skewed monocle on his muzzle, he slid slender but firm arms under the writhing, wounded detective's torso and gauged his weight. "We must get you off of here, son. For your sake, and the . . . the Queen's." He frowned, amazed, for a split second, at his sudden patriotism. He did not doubt it came from the thought that Marie Hudson would be pleased by the new attitude. He shuddered it off and continued, "That damned Ames has lost his head and doesn't even know he's shooting at the Royal Transport. So here we go, one, two . . ." And then, with one fierce, concerted act of strength, Professor Moriarty lifted Sherlock Holmes into his arms, slung him over his shoulder, and made to leap from the carriage. " . . . _thrr..eee…by God, you're heavier than you..llloook…but we shall see this through!._" Yes: He was going to save his arch nemesis's life.

But the best-laid plans of mice and men . . . .

"Hear, hear! A sound declaration!" a shrill, yet somehow commanding, female voice rang from through the hole in the carriage below the two men. A very nationally recognized voice. "Have I the distinct . . . _pleasure_ . . . of the company of London's own Napoleon of Crime?" A small round old face with incisive little eyes drew through the hole in the carriage roof. Queen Victoria, having ordered her progeny to stay ducking out of harm's way, had stood on her tiptoes on the brougham seat and was now peeping out at the struggling Moriarty and wounded Holmes. "And the world's foremost private consulting detective?"

"You have, Your Highness!" Moriarty's heart was thundering with terror, but something perverse, craving confrontation and adrenaline and irony, made him rise to the occasion, with his best curling, cavalier smirk. He flung off his hat in an effort at a proper doffing—no easy task with Holmes slung over his back, so bowing was most definitely out of the question.

"Your Majesty!" A familiar basso male voice boomed from inside the carriage. "Do come back at _once_!"

Holmes stirred, wriggling in his once-mentor's grasp. "M-_Mycroft_?" he whinnied in disbelief.

"You always did say he _was_ the British Government, Holmes," Moriarty grunted, trying to steady himself and calm his charge.

"The British _Foreign Agency_," the detective corrected, with remarkable brusqueness for the blood loss that was cascading out his belly wound and dribbling all over his rescuer's back. "Hm . . . curious . . ._very curious_ . . ._spies_ . . . "

Ames fired again; the shot missed, ricocheted off the carriage and struck the unfortunate driver in the shoulder. He toppled off the carriage. Inside, the voice of the Princess shrieked and Mycroft Holmes cursed. Shoscomb Prince and his white-maned partner reared and bucked and ran all the faster. There came the sound of rummaging about from within the carriage, and Mycroft, the Queen's apparent bodyguard and agent, cried for the Queen's retreat once more. Once more, she ignored him utterly.

"_Fighting _the demons of the city rather than _being _them, are you, Professor?" she chirped angrily. "Well, I suppose we _all eventually_ learn the Christian merits of protecting our Mother Empire!"

Ames fired again, and missed again. Taking a chunk, however, out of the back of the carriage.

"Professor," Holmes murmured feebly. "Make haste, I beg of you . . .do _not_ tarry!"

" '_Lie back and think of England,_' right, Marm?" Moriarty brayed, ignoring his charge, still grinning at the monarch. He nodded to indicate the Princess hidden inside the carriage—a princess among others in her family who were recently wed to insipid foreign princes, whose wedding night was endured with such a motto, for 'the good of England.' "Right . . . _Mrs. Brown_?" And then he actually winked at the Queen.

"Why, you saucy, _impudent _. . .brave. . . _noble_. . .!" Victoria's face was a mixture of incensed and acutely amused. And then something even more complicated. But she was unable to respond before two portly hands snaked up through the roof, and the livid, fat face of Mycroft Holmes seethed a curse at him before pulling her inside to relative safety. "Get off the damned roof before your chaser has the Crown—and my _brother_—killed, Moriarty!" he snarled.

The criminal was about to oblige voluntarily . . . when an intercession of another sort forced his hand.

Ames fired again.

This time he hit his mark: in Moriarty's chest, just below his left shoulder.

The criminal let out a strangled wail and flopped like a limp ragdoll from the carriage, taking the hapless Holmes down with him. They fell together to the cobblestones of a nearby alley, face first.

Ames shouted at his driver to turn and trample the two geniuses of London. But Mycroft, who had climbed to the driver's seat of the Royal Carriage, cut the corporate's transport off decisively. "Don't you _dare!_" he thundered.

"Mr. Holmes!" the same royal shriek emitted from within the carriage. "Your brother, and the Professor! See to them!"

"The _Professor?"_ Mycroft's roaring protest was, in his ever-present prudence, muffled to the point of a strangled wail. "Your Highness, that man is James Moriarty!"

"Well aware of it!" came Queen Victoria's snapping, and currently cryptic, soprano.

"But, Your Grace, surely you know that man. . . . well, his crimes against the Empire . . ." Mycroft turned in the driver's seat and peered into the passenger compartment; something that he saw inside that space made him pause. ". . . Quite . . . quite right. At any rate, I am afraid we will have to return for them later. Forgive me, Sherlock—I shall send the Irregulars straight away!"

With this anxious declaration to his fallen younger brother, the portly but spry Mycroft whirled the carriage in a sharp turn away from the fallen forms—in pursuit of the Ames Corporation carriage, the passenger of which seemed to have at last realized the gravity of his actions: For he was fleeing for his life. Cobblestones were pounded upon by two sets of brougham-towing horse hooves, the latter of which, borne by the illustrious Shoscomb Prince, easily gaining on the Ames carriage as the two transports vanished into the London fog.

Then there was silence, and Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty were alone together. Alone and mortally wounded.

Moriarty spoke. As usual. "Well. This was . . . an unexpected turn." He forced himself to roll over, moaning all the way. "Oh, Jesus, it . . . it hurts."

"Did it strike your heart?" Holmes croaked, crawling over to him, peeling his shirt off his shoulder. Bleeding all the while, himself. "Are you . . .? Ohh. Oh damn." For an instant, as he turned on his back, dragging his stomach away from the street grime that might embed and infect his stab wound, Holmes's head thudded against Moriarty's shoulder and was forced to rest there. He scurried around, struggling to move away. "Oh, shite. Oh, damn that Katherine Ferrell."

"Easy, son." Moriarty feebly pushed him away, biting his lip not to cry out at the pressure exerted on his own wound by the detective's accosting head. "Lie still. It will slow the blood . . . Ferrell. You also figured it was she, eh?"

"From the moment she screamed and fell into the Queen's carriage, yes."

". . . You were always good at reading my mind and acting one step before I. I remember the day you took the challenge from that foolish, arrogant lad Dudley Fulton, to find the school trophy. God, but you were just a lad of 17 then. I think we both realized it was in the antique vase, but it was you who stepped up and broke it. At least I applauded you, and won a half-crown wager in favor of you. In _favor_. Ha. How strange what time does to friendships. " Unreadable emotion in Moriarty's voice, then, as he lay there in London street filth. But the far-off glaze in his eyes was not malicious. It was oddly. . . nostalgic.

Holmes turned away from his once-mentor's gaze, fierce irritation seizing him. How dare that traitor so casually refer to their mutual past? As if nothing had ever really driven a wedge between them. "What's it to you?" he snapped, eyes finding, abruptly, extreme interest with the wood grain patterns of the packing crates flung into the alley all around them by some long-departed sailors. "You act as though you suddenly _care_. As though _I_ ever really _mattered_ in your bloody little schemes. You'd have found another intelligent but gullible young _puppet_ to _amuse _yourself with by day while committing heinous crimes by night."

Moriarty recoiled like a dozing serpent having awakened from a pleasant dream. His face was frozen in a mask of shocked anger, or perhaps it was self-disgust for being caught off guard in so candid a state. He could not speak above a gravelly whisper, but every word was a dagger. "You _can't_ really _believe_ that! I always cared. _Always_. Even when you destroyed me in respectable London Society, revealing all my criminal acts and scandals. Do you think it's a coincidence that I suddenly took pride in being a criminal rather than hiding it? _No_! I only donned the title of 'Napoleon of Crime' to _spite you_! To make you think I _loved_ the beast you had reduced me to! I _never wanted_ to be a villain _exclusively,_ but you gave me no choice—you _ruined _my _honest _career in academia, fanned the flames, so there was nothing left for me to turn to but my crimes! Ever thought of it _that_ way? No, I bet you _didn't_! No! I could _not_ help that you insisted on putting your _insatiable_ sense of justice over _our friendship_."

It was strange, though neither of them saw it, how much the wounds of the past oozed their bilious, bitter pus while the real physiological wounds of the present were opened anew.

A seething silence passed. Then Holmes spoke.

"Old timer."

The criminal received the blow with bravado, and shot back, "Meddling, snot-nosed pup."

Fury—fury, at least, for Holmes. "Megalomaniacal _non _-genius. _Has-been_ _criminal_!"

"Emotionally constipated, pretentious, _scared child_! Scared of sending more girls to the grave, is that it, _boy_?" Moriarty laughed—it was not a pleasant sound. It was not even a laugh, really. More like a vengeful series of snickering wheezes.

Holmes hesitated for a moment, but the pain was so great, and his heart so heavy. So he said it: _"Bastard."_

And Moriarty fell silent. His breathing grew sharper. "That . . . was unkind." For it was true. And there was nothing the wounded orphan could do to refute it. His greatest secret pain—being the bastard son of an Irishman and an Egyptian, both dead and helpless to defend him. One, the Irishman, never having been willing to defend him in life, either. Such desolation, such anguish, the thought of this. He bit his lip—hard. So the lad had surpassed him, at last, in succeeding at heartless, robotic cruelty. How the mighty indeed had fallen.

The detective winced from the inside out. It had felt glorious, the accusation, the filthy word, when it had drawled out his lips. But now, such shame! Why such shame when his old betrayer, his lover's killer, so deserved it?

Perhaps because he was _alive _right now, and capable of saying _anything_, good or harmful, because of the man whom he had just so incisively insulted.

"That was . . . a little joke, Professor." He shrank into himself at the utter lameness of his excuse.

Crisply: "_Very _little, Mr. Holmes." Moriarty, by his peevishness, had at least regained a smidgen of his dignity.

"I am . . ." Holmes coughed, his windpipe suddenly obstructed and gravelly. "I am sorry."

"I goaded you on. Do not blame yourself."

"That is . . . the first time that I have ever heard you say something like that to _me_."

". . . Blame the delerium."

The ice melted: The two men shared soft laughter, around grimaces of pain.

Silence.

Holmes shuddered, clutching his red-splashed belly, eyes squeezed shut.

Moriarty's dimming gaze found respite peering through the small crack of rich night sky between the buildings' clotheslines and tight-packed roofs. He concentrated on his breathing, on the cold of the alley, even on his throbbing wound, to stay awake. It was not the first time, in a long life of danger and transgression, that he'd done this.

" . . . Holmes?"

"Yes?" The detective was irritable, almost angry for being drawn from his deceptively euphoric drowsiness.

" Stay awake, m'boy. Come about, now. Stay awake."

Silence.

"_Holmes_." Moriarty smacked a hand across the side of his unlikely companion's cheek.

Holmes snorted and fumed. Roused again from his anemic stupor, he shot a sleepy glare at the criminal. "_What_?"

Thus pinned under the gaze of his great foe, the Napoleon of Crime flung the attention grabber to end all straight into the detective's face, bleeding there on his back in a filthy, rainy alley. His voice was haggard. " . . . Remind me again . . . _why _we are _enemies_."

Holmes stared at him mutely, registering the profoundly vulnerable offer of détente on Moriarty's part. In the back of his mind, he realized it as a final peace offering by his former mentor, on the brink of almost certain death. He blinked, quickly reigning in his surprise. "You yourself once said, upon my foiling your plot to steal the Royal Submarine from Admiral Raythunder, that I was the most irritating person you ever met."

"Did I? Well, it's hardly untrue. You make a dishonest living all but impossible, even for a man of my talent." The Professor paused to chuckle at his own arrogance—something he'd never before recognized he possessed in excess, much less found amusing. "But there are . . . other matters . . . of common . . . common _spirit_, I should say . . . that outweigh our differences. Do you not agree?"

" . . . I do." Holmes smiled at Moriarty and for the briefest instant, time stopped and immeasurable respect and regard passed between the two great minds, who, together, could have accomplished anything within mortal comprehension.

But then it passed. "But there is that small matter of your occupation."

"I shall say it again: It was never my choice to lose your friendship, Holmes. It _grieved _me when you got in the way that first time we crossed blades. To lose you . . . You scoff, sir. But I _mean_ it."

" . . . It is rather _late_ to make offers of affection." Again Holmes turned sharply away. "When I was a lad, you told me not to cling to the past. Yet the Rhamme Tep was the incarnation of such. You told me never to let emotions override discipline. It has been your own downfall each time that I have undercut you. Each smile and offer of praise was to throw me off the scent of your heretical mind, a mask of your real intentions. How much of it was true sentiment, the true affection of a mentor . . . of . . . of a surrogate brother, or father? I shall never be certain. It would be quite daunting to prove you're not a hypocrite to me now, Professor. In short . . . it is hardly appropriate for me to consult with a Career Criminal."

Moriarty turned away, resigning to the feeling that he'd received as much of an answer as he ever would from the man who, as a boy, had been his star pupil. His _favorite _pupil. The pupil who had always asked the daring, complicated questions that he loved to answer. The pupil who came devotedly to class, to his office, to anyplace that smelled of curiosity-quenching. Who listened, understood, applied, took risks, fell, and rose again undaunted to learn more. Who delighted in challenge—just as _he _did, who appreciated and idolized him as the teacher that germinated and issued those challenges. And for a split instant, Moriarty realized how much he _missed _that boy's adoration. A loss that was _his_ fault alone. But at last, amusement bandaged over the pangs of nostalgia. "Pshaw! A technicality!" His chuckling grew to a hearty laugh, too great a strain, for he suddenly winced and fell silent. "Oh, damnation," he whispered, as the wave of pain passed. "At least I got you chattering your mouth off pompously just like your old self. Holmes . . . if my boys and I ever get out of this alive, I'll forever be beholden to you. Let's . . . just leave it at that, shall we?"

"You feel that much guilt for your affection towards Marie Hudson?" Holmes managed to plaster a sly grin across his face despite his suffering.

Firmly, in a deadpan tone, Moriarty snapped back, "She has nothing to do with it. Not _this _lady, at least." His gaze grew distant. His expression was flat, indiscernible.

Holmes understood immediately. He tried to swallow the sick rage of recollection. "It was an accident. You did not mean to kill Elizabeth."

"No," the Professor guffawed miserably, "only _you_! Miss Hardy may have waltzed straight into the Gates of Eternity, but _I_ opened them wide for her. Of all the things about you that I have loathed, I _don't_ hold you a grudge for never forgiving me that. After all, I still would have . . . well . . . at least at the time I . . . "

Silence.

Holmes followed the Professor's upward gaze, towards the stars. "I do believe that you and I are bound to walk through those same Gates arm in arm, Professor. _Bound._ Such is the fate of the coin, and its two equal but opposite sides."

" . . . Quite."

"I've told Watson and . . .and Irene . . . Elizabeth's last words. Perhaps I should tell you. She said she would be waiting . . .and that I would be late, as always . . ."

" . . . Knew you well, didn't she?"

"Yes. And . . .and you. Do you indeed _love _Mrs. Hudson? Do you know what I _lost _that night, so many years past, by cherishing her? Do you wish for someone who will wait for _you_?"

"I think I do. As much as I am capable of such feelings . . . yes."

"Congratulations. There is _no_ crime in 'l'amour,' as the French put it."

"Thank you."

"Not at all, old chap. It's the least I can do to ease the conscience of a man who sees himself as _owing_ me something."

Moriarty's voice slid to a deep dark register. "Well, it shan't happen again, I assure you. No more favors from Sherlock Holmes. No more gratitude from me. Now, be a sport and fetch me that knapsack to put behind my neck, just shimmy over to it and, there's a lad—good, and . . ." The Professor's face fell with realization as Holmes smugly obliged.

"You're _quite_ welcome, _old _man," the detective snickered.

"_Blast_!"

"Bad habits die hard, do they?"

"_Irritating_. You . . . _you _. . . The _most irritating person_ _ever_!"

"You flatter me, Moriarty."

"Oh, shut up."

Hours passed. Holmes had long since adopted silence, as his compatriot, having so valiantly tried to keep him awake, had finally succumbed to the drowsiness brought by his bullet wound. He was stunned to realize he actually _worried _for the restlessly slumbering Moriarty.

He actually _cared_.

He…

Footsteps? Yes. Footsteps, tiny pattering sounds, and the whispers of children. For a moment he feared he too had arrived at a state of delerium, and that he was imagining a throng of cherubs, but sure enough, there appeared a soot-encrusted mob of chubby-faced, skinny-legged scrappers, chief among them Wiggins and Polly, the head Baker Street Irregulars. "Mr. Holmes!" the little girl whimpered, flying to his side, head coming down gently against his chest. "You hold on, Mr. Holmes, we caught wind of your situation! A little birdie named Alline Christopher told us!"

"That's right, sir," the boy chipped in. "It'll be ally-oop and up to Baker Street and Doc Watson for you, sir, it will!"

"My thanks, children," Holmes croaked. "Could you all brace me up like a gurney, and carry me to my rooms?"

"Course, sir!" Wiggins assured, giving a sharp whistle and drawing five of the strongest lads among the gold-hearted riff raff to bodily lift Holmes.

The detective turned over his shoulder and gazed reluctantly at the fallen criminal genius that he was leaving behind. "Children….I should like to ask one last favor. Come back for Professor Moriarty, and bring him to Baker Street as well."

"That old varlet?" Wiggins snapped. "Sir, you're daft with fever! He tried to kill you one too many times for us to take pity on him, he did!"

"For all his faults, Wiggins," Holmes refuted wearily, still cold and weakened by his blood loss, "he employs over half the street urchins in this town that its very own orphanages discard. I do not _always_ demean the things that James Moriarty does. And villain…._villain _may perhaps be _too _strong a word for him now…"

"_No, sir_!" several children piped in unison. "No sell!"

Polly, of all of them—the one whom Moriarty had most directly injured, threatening her life when she had gotten in the way of his criminal plans a year ago—hung back behind the crowd of makeshift rescuers. "….I don't think this is fair," she declared at last, in a calm but firm, clear tone. A piercing tone of truth. "I think we need to give him another chance. Maybe he won't be a villain anymore, not at all, if he gets a second chance."

"Polly," Wiggins complained in his reedy Cockney. "The man's a ravin' lunatic, a bounder! It don't make _sense_…"

"Yes, it does!" the girl shot back: reminding Holmes amazingly of Irene Adler, in her prima donna-esque domination of the scene before them all: the blue-misty London fog, the cobblestones, the alley was her stage, and she commanding it, hands planted on her little hips. "I was a pick-pocket before I met Mr. Holmes, and I got to be a good girl because he gave me a _second chance_!"

"You was _always_ good, Polly, ya silly wee girl!" Wiggins railed.

"Yes, Wiggins, but I got a chance to prove that to _everyone_ and to _really_ start over because Mr. Holmes had a little _faith _in me." The girl planted her feet on the earth next to Professor Moriarty's fallen form—becoming his unlikely savior. "Now, if the police find him, he's off to jail. If no one does, he's dead. Either way he'll just be remembered as a washed-up criminal. He won't get a chance to start over. Can't we just spare half an hour's walking to come back and fetch him? Please?"

The boy stared long and hard at his street compatriot, and then finally, with a groan, nodded. "Fine. But we get Mr. Holmes safe first!"

The girl grinned triumphantly and nodded. "Agreed!"

The detective smiled quietly and allowed himself to be buoyed like a toy boat on a lapping sea, a dozen little hands lifting him up toward the sky, oscillating closer to and farther from the cold, dark velvet sky and its stars. The buildings pulled back from obstruction of the night sky; they must be reaching the open street.

Post-haste, it seemed, true to their word, the Baker Street Irregulars delivered him to his abode, Polly knocking fiercely on the door.

Mrs. Hudson, her face a scratched up and even a bit bruised, as though from arduous combat, answered, both male and female in her garb—her dress covering the top of her but the gown hem stuffed into men's trousers. She flung open the door with a frantic look on her face. Behind her, Todd and Smiley barreled up to the door. First intense relief, and then fear, filled all three of their faces.

"Ms. Adler is out scouring the East End for you, and I was about to come looking in Kensington!" the landlady cried. "My _God_, Sherlock, I am so happy to see you are alive! But . . . children. . .?" Her voice trailed as she looked down at the young rescuers, hands tightly wrung about the hilt of Irene Adler's tiny pocket pistol, which she undoubtedly had planned to take with her to the alleys in search of her two dear male friends. Absently she put it down on the table in the foyer, face going paler by the minute. She stepped aside, allowing the children to carry Holmes into the front sitting room. "Where is . . .?"

"_Where's the Professor_?!" Smiley broke in gracelessly, in a half-stifled scream, his eyes wide with panic, his hands to his head. "The Colonel, an' an…the Doctor, too, they told us…." He gestured helplessly and frantically in towards the parlor, from which the forms of Watson and Moran were rapidly approaching. "Oh _Lord…!"_

"Has he met up with Ms. Adler?" Todd broke in more steadily, his stub face frozen in a contrastingly dubious mask of graveness. He moved to pick up the very woman's pistol, as though his sailor's grisly experience of combat and its outcomes were far more pessimistic than the landlady's. "In the East End, I mean? Where she's lookin' for him an' Holmes?"

The children fell silent. "No, he's _dead_," Wiggins suddenly, and somewhat viciously, claimed. "Or as good as!"

Mrs. Hudson faltered and nearly fell. A strange tremulous cry escaped her.

Todd and Smiley, and Moran, who came up behind them, looked like they had been stabbed in the belly. Moran skidded to a halt in place, his teeth bared and clenched. "_I beg your pardon?"_ he hissed, seeing straight through the boy's soul with his eerily cold, bright blue eyes.

"Don't listen to him!" Polly snapped. "Professor Moriarty is not dead yet! He's lying in the same alley where we found Mr. Holmes! Just hurt! Hurt saving Mr. Holmes's life!"

"Oh," Mrs. Hudson interjected simply, nodding, almost frenziedly, swallowing several times as though to keep herself from vomiting. She managed a wobbly little smile of relief and gratitude, clutching the curtains of one of the front windows to steady herself. Her voice steeled itself finally, and she drew herself up tall. "Then you must immediately go fetch him." Her fair emerald eyes riveted on the Baker Street Irregulars, and lingered on the face of Polly. " I mean _now_. I will not lose two…two…." Her voice trailed again, and she looked away as though in sudden intense pain. "_I will not lose another_."

"You _won't_," the little girl pledged, bravely deriving fierce glares from her compatriots, who understood only that Moriarty had once been Holmes's worst enemy—who did not see the nuances of love and hate behind their past, and behind the present romance between the 'villain' and his dear landlady. "I will lead Colonel Moran to the Professor. We'll be back before the hour, Mrs. Hudson."

". . . Thank you, Polly," the widow replied, in a soft whimper between her teeth. Still clutching to the curtains, and to her hope.

The girl nodded, then fearlessly skipped across the foyer and over to Moran, tapping on his great, muscular arm. "Let's be off, then, eh?" she chirped. Her compatriots gave scoffs of disgust and dispersed from the room out into the night.

Moran nodded, grinning back with large, sharp, yellow teeth that somehow retained a charming, comrade-in-arms type of air. "I get the feeling you are not one with whom a wise man should argue. Lead the way, Miss Polly." He glanced back at the two young men to whom Moriarty was a father, taking in their petrified expressions. "Be of courage, lads. And . . . comfort the lady in your presence, please." Here he gave unexpected tribute to Mrs. Hudson by offering her an almost imperceptible nod, and an uncharacteristically sheepish smile, as though, for a brief instant, he realized that for all their contentions over Moriarty's lifestyle and temperament, they both loved him dearly—and had thus found a common denominator.

Then he became the hunter again, silently stalking out the door after Polly, and the nighttime swallowed them.

Mrs. Hudson closed the door behind them and began to pray. "God save us all…"

Holmes, listening silently to all of this, and attempting to absorb it with his usual sponge-like retention, was vaguely prescient that he was lulling out of consciousness. "In…indeed…"

"Holmes!" Watson, the last thing he saw, shouted, relief spilling over his voice and his wettened eyes. "Oh, Saints Alive, my dear, dear chap!" He approached his detective friend and took him from the children, dragging him up the stairs to his bedchamber. "It will be alright, my friend. I am here. That cut will be just a scratch from a toothpick once _I'm_ done with it!"

One last individual was present in the house during this trying meeting. Katherine Ferrell sat in empty-eyed, stark, shocked silence on those steps. Watson passed her on his way up the stairs, casting her a look halfway between pity and scorn, as she peeled her stealthy black men's costume from her form, twisting her hair in her free hand like Ophelia in ebony drag, revealing some of Moran's own walking-out clothes, far too large on her, underneath. "I can explain…" was all she managed to say, over and over again.

Mrs. Hudson went to her and held her in her arms, in that unconditionally loving manner of hers, for the forty minutes that Polly and Colonel Moran were gone.

Upstairs, I, Watson, delicately undressed my friend, slipped him into one of his starched nightshirts, and carefully disinfected and sewed up his wound—making a point of scolding him and forcing him to promise to stay in bed for several days (a promise I knew well and good he would not keep, but I had to start somewhere, after all). He awoke and drifted periodically, whetting parched lips, and making grumbling remarks about his miscalculations regarding "Miss Ferrier, Irene, Jack, and James." In any other situation, the notion of referring to Jack the Ripper and James Moriarty in terms equally familiar as his sometimes-lover Irene Adler might be absurdly funny, but as it was the product of his near-delirious pain and exhaustion, I refrained from laughter and finished my job as surgeon: and as friend.

Then the _real_ trial of the evening came.

A knock at the door—Smiley vaulted across the room downstairs and flung the latch open before Mrs. Hudson could even disentangle from Kat.

Colonel Moran burst into the room carrying a thoroughly pale, pasty, and unconscious James Moriarty. His shirt was soaked in deep red and his face, even in sleep, was twisted in anguish. Mrs. Hudson was at his side at once, her cheek caressing his for an agonizing, silent ten seconds, blood dripping on her borrowed trousers. "My James," she whimpered.

I must confess that it took me several moments to recover from the shock. Moriarty, twice as wounded as Holmes, and both these facts coming to pass because he had tried to _save his life_!

Polly gestured at me to descend the stairs, and chimed in self-importantly, bringing up the rear behind Todd and Smiley, "He's really sick, Dr. Watson."

"Yes, Polly, I know," I replied tightly, my ambivalence towards the sight of a barely-living Moriarty growing—growing because her bright brown eyes were begging me to do something about it. I patted her head and bade her go get some rest in the guest bedroom. She skipped off to do my bidding, unaware of the gloom that surrounded we adults.

The two lads carried Moriarty to the couch in Holmes's study. Then Sebastian came forth and took my arms, and when I studied his terrified face, all traces of his sinister self, from only days ago, were lost. He was, wordlessly, begging for my help. "Please, John?" he breathed at last.

My eyes swept over the watchful and afraid Todd and Smiley, lingering by the couch, Moriarty in it—his head flinging deliriously from side to side, body wracked with shivers, shallow whines and gasps sounding in his throat. He clawed at his red-gushing chest wound. I saw their fear, their sick, lost fear, as they watched their master, their adopted father, fading.

"Oh, Doctor. Oh, _sir_! He . . . he thanked us for bein' with him so long," Smiley suddenly burst out, swallowing a sob that, in its candidness, was heartbreakingly childlike. He spoke in a high-pitched, rambling voice, hoping, I realized, that his simple logic, his defense, very really that of a wicked man's devoted son, would prevail over my stern judgment. "Only just a few months ago! He thanked us that time we stole away that flute player David under the Thames, you know? That one: an' we thought we'd win all this bullion, sir, an' so I made him lobsters and got some white wine to celebrate, an' he smiled at me an' at Toddie, but I cried, Doctor Watson, for I couldn't _believe_ all that good fortune could be _mine_, and . . . and —he asked me . . . he . . . " Another sob, this time unrestrained; try though Todd might to calm his gangly young friend, Smiley was trembling and wrenching his hands, evading the stouter lad's comforting, and crying like a little boy. "He ain't bad, Doctor, he _ain't!_ N-not _all _bad! He put his hand on me shoulder and asked me '_what's wrong, my boy_,' an' he said it would be _all right_, Doctor, an' that he _understood_!"

"I remember him sayin' that, too," Todd mumbled accord, staring somberly at the floor.

"Oh, sir!" The delicately tempered Smiley continued railing, and weeping. "He took care of me when I were a boy, and he said he _always _would! I were a little lad the first time he said 'Smiley, it will be alright, I'll always take care of you,' and he . . . well, ever since, he . . . He _canna_' die, sir, not _now_!" The young once-pirate came forward and clutched my hands in his; so thin and icy his were, and clammy with terror and anticipated grief. "_Please_, sir! Me . . . me _mum's_ gone, you know. Not him . . . not him _too."_

Blast. I set my jaw. Such an awful, wicked man, Moriarty was, reduced to a pitiable, sick child, writhing in helpless misery here in our abode. I could let the blackguard slip away to eternal slumber merely by doing nothing—and at long last be myself at ease. But . . .

I appealed to Holmes—reclined in his bedroom, staring keenly through the doorway and through his own pain at Moriarty, directly across the room from him. As ever, I could not read the thoughts stirring behind my friend's visage. But when our eyes met, he nodded, once, and called, "Go on, Watson. Help him."

Still I hesitated. Then Mrs. Hudson came forward, and took Smiley's wettened face in her hands. She smiled at him, and his hyperventilating breaths calmed. He sank into a seat, next to a silent Todd, who, it seemed, was fiercely, as befit his gruffer temperament, fighting his own tears. Then the widow, too, took my hand, and squeezed it. "Please, Dr. Watson," she pleaded, "be my hero tonight."

It was all I needed to make my decision. "Sebastian," I snapped, feeling my wits sliding smoothly into the element of their utmost expertise. "Fetch my medical bag—yes, there, in the closet. I just now put it back after tending to Holmes."

My army mate darted to retrieve what I requested. Together, we approached the suffering professor. He had taken to incoherent mumbling, speaking in shallow breaths, in mixtures of English and some foreign tongue, none of the words making sense. I glanced at Sebastian with a frown.

"Egyptian," he supplied. "Some native tongue, even I don't know it after years traveling all those lands. Village dialect. I used to catch him mumbling it to himself every so often, but he _never_ speaks it when he thinks someone _else_ is listening . . . God, John, he's _bad_, isn't he?"

I didn't answer him. Instead, I addressed my unlikely patient, waving my hand across his half-hooded, glazed eyes. Moriarty blinked, scowled, and the flow of alien words grew loud before, abruptly, he fell mute. "W-what?" he spewed. "Who . . . what?"

"Professor, do you know where you are?" I queried gently.

He gulped, head thrusting towards my voice. "_Unh_ . . . D-Dr. _Watson_? What the devil . . .?"

"Good enough," I murmured. "He's still reasonably lucid."

But when I drew my forceps from my bag, advanced towards his wound and unbuttoned his shirt, Moriarty let loose a snarl and lashed out at me. For such a weakened man, his blows were remarkably fierce and well-aimed. He nearly struck me in the jaw. "Can't kill _me_, English cur!" he hollered, still flailing. "I am _immortal_!"

"Professor, you've been shot, don't you recall?" I retorted.

" . . . _Immortal_ . . ."

"No, Moriarty," I pressed patiently, "you are _injured_, and your wound has been infected. You have a fever, sir."

He fell into another fit of spasms and incoherent moans. I snapped my fingers at his ears. "Come _back_, Professor, it's only Dr. Watson, like you said. Yes, _there's_ a good man. _Good_. Yes, keep your eyes on _me_, Moriarty."

I could see my patient was struggling desperately to oblige, but at this point, he lacked the mental resources. The fever had deeply contaminated his brain, and his gaze roved to indeterminate spots in Holmes's study, at intervals alarmed and dazed. "Immortal . . . _not_? I am not . . .?" he babbled.

"There is no anesthesia in this house," I apologized. "You will have to brace yourself—this _will_ hurt."

"Hurt . . ." Moriarty croaked, though whether it was an acknowledgement or merely a mindless echo, I could not discern. His fur grew damp with sweat. Then, as I swabbed the wound with alcohol, and Sebastian held his partner in crime steady and still in the couch's lap, Moriarty went taut, let out a small, sob-like gasp, and mumbled something else.

"What's that?" I paused, knife and forceps poised to make the life-saving cut, and leaned close to the grimacing professor's mouth. "Say it again, old boy."

"I believe he said, '_Hurry_,'" Sebastian offered, mildly uncertain. His face, unlike Todd and Smiley's remained helpfully composed, seasoned from many years in many bloody battlefields and at many Poker games. Temperately he repeated, "Something like, 'Hurry, where are you?'"

"No!" Mrs. Hudson cried, leaping from her unobtrusive spot in the doorway and towards us. The portent on her frightened little face proved she had abruptly stumbled upon serendipity. "No, he said, '_Marie_, where are you!'" She leaned across the couch and took Professor Moriarty's clammy face in her hands. "I am right _here_," she pledged, smiling at him to prove it. She shook her head; disheveled little sunbursts of hair fell and framed her flushed cheeks. "I am _not_ going _anywhere_."

Sebastian gawked at her—something akin to admiration flooded his eyes. "Oh, my lady," he whispered, mingling scorn and sorrow. But he could not bring himself to stop her from touching, and caring for, his ravaged friend. In the forlorn stairwell, Kat Ferrell began to sob. Her fiancé tore his gaze from the extraordinary widow and retreated to comfort her, leaving Moriarty unmanned.

"_Todd_," I hissed, snapping my fingers at the steadier-headed of Moriarty's two remaining employees. "Please come hold the professor down while I remove the bullet."

To my astonishment, the stout lad balked. "I'm afraid he'll _hurt_ me, sir," he simpered, close to tears himself.

"Then _I'll _do it, Todd, ye fool!" Smiley, to my further shock, berated. All traces of his rattled self now gone, he stooped down beside me to offer the assistance and cool professionalism of a field nurse. It only proved more, to me, the truth that no living soul could be judged by its outward substance.

Just as my dear friend Holmes had told me: many_, many_ times.

"Thank you, Mr. Marrow," I applauded the boy with a smile.

Then I made the cut—small and precise though it was, the bullet was deeply lodged, and Moriarty, for all his bravery, cried out and jolted. Smiley held him down as gently as possible.

"Aye, I _am_ going to die," the professor gritted. "_Damnation_! I'm going to . . ."

"_Live_." Mrs. Hudson cut him off softly—but firmly. "You will live, James, don't say you'll do anything else." Se stroked his face again, and cradled his head in her arms. "_Stay_. Please, for _me_. Stay."

He retched and sobbed all at once, pressing his face against her chest as I extracted the bullet—an act I'd masterfully, thank God, accomplished thousands of times on the fields of Afghanistan. I prepared to sew up the wound.

Then the criminal tugged away from Mrs. Hudson's grasp, trying to look at the pan in which I discarded my bloodied tools, at the sharp needle that I carefully threaded. A choking, coughing sound, like the noise of a young child struggling to breathe through smoke, came up his throat. His voice acquired a higher pitch. Like a child's. "_Please_ don't kill me," he begged—confused, again, as to my identity. "Sir, _don't kill me_ . . ." His eyes grew wide with terror—the eyes of a boy. And I realized, in that moment, that I_ pitied_ James Moriarty—dreadfully.

"Look at _me_," Mrs. Hudson coaxed. "Look at me, my dearest."

He obeyed, eyes falling on her face as a sea captain would look at a lighthouse in a storm. For a split instant, as I took advantage of his docility to sew up the wound, Moriarty was completely lucid.

" . . . I _love _you," he told our landlady.

My head swam at the declaration. _No. Not you. You are not capable of that! _I nearly sewed the final stitch of the bullet hole crooked. I flashed a look at Holmes—at a countenance that was a mask of pure horror. Then he looked at me, and hid his disgust in his ever-present chilly disinterest. He turned his expressionless gray eyes to the wall.

"Dr. Watson," Moriarty moaned, compelling me to return my attention to my patient.

"Yes, Professor?"

" . . . Thank you, sir. You didn't have to do this, but . . ."

"Quite alright," I interjected, trying to smile.

"No, no, I must . . ." he pressed drowsily, " I . . . sir, you are a man of . . . honor . . . and I . . ." His words began to slur.

My shoulders hunched. I felt hideously ill at ease to be thanked by such a repugnant creature. "Tut, now, enough praise. Get some rest, Professor."

But Moriarty had already slipped back into his delirious world. He was far from a place of safety yet. "Christ," I breathed, " I think he thanked me _far_ too prematurely." A drop of sweat trickled down my forehead; until that moment, as I wiped it away, I had not even realized how nervous I was.

Smiley cast me a rueful look. "You did your _best_, gov—all we can ask o' ye," he mumbled, rising to rejoin the trembling Todd. Sebastian, too, returned, with Kat lurking silently behind him.

Since the Professor's sudden and heartfelt declaration, Mrs. Hudson had gone steadfastly silent. At last she spoke. "I'll not leave him alone for one _moment _tonight."

I drew a sigh and sought her face for a hint of weakness. It was uncooperatively stoic. "Is that clear, Dr. Watson?" With this, she seated herself on the arm of the sofa, and I wondered why it was even relevant whether I accepted her determined vigil or not. For she would alter her course for nothing and no one.

"I cannot promise you that the Professor will even live until morning, my dear," I murmured, glancing sidelong at the vigilant Sebastian, Todd and Smiley. Only my old army mate heard me, nodding, but his blank visage, that of a seasoned veteran, still betrayed nothing to the two worried boys in his custody. I continued, " The wound is . . . very infected, you see. I shan't let you endure that alone. So I'll watch over Holmes, as well—maybe I might provide some comfort."

"Could I perhaps volunteer such a post in your place, doctor?" A new voice, a woman's, familiar and rich, oozed into the silence between us.

Irene Adler strode softly into the sitting room, enduring our collective astonished stares. She carried several books on physics and chemistry theorems as well as sensationalist literature, and a bottle of tonic, in her supple arms. As she swept into a chair opposite Holmes's bed, her gown swished like blue seafoam against her ankles. "I . . . have many scholarly essays of interest to read to Mr. Holmes, you see." On her face was an unbridled look of distress ill suited to her typical charm.

Holmes met eyes with her, half-asleep and sanguine. At last he smiled, and uncupped his clammy, limp hand. She took it at once, and squeezed it. "Well?"

I watched my companion's scrutinizing, chilly gray eyes melt to unguarded, warmly glowing embers. "You most certainly may . . . my _dear _Irene."

For a moment I almost thought I heard him say "Elizabeth." But perhaps it was a trick of my own mind's exhaustion.

Ms. Adler's eyes shifted sidelong at my wearily bent frame. I understood her embarrassment, and limped towards my bedroom door.

In the duration, I glimpsed the magnificent femme fatale, the opera star, bent over Holmes's bed, brushing lips with him, leaning upward to caress his cheek and forehead, which began to gain considerably more color than they had lately possessed. She took his peaceful head in her lap and began to read about the art of Spiritualism.

I have never seen my friend so blissfully entranced. For this I found myself at last able to spare a chuckle and a sigh of relief.

Katherine Ferrell, thus far a pale, shivering ghost in the stairwell, bound up the remaining steps between us and accosted me. "Oh, Dr. Watson, sir, if I may please beg of you and my dear friend Marie for a chance to make this up to Mr. Holmes. . ."

"Kat, love," Sebastian interjected, "I really think they understood your misguidedness."

Her eyes narrowed. "This is a matter of _personal _atonement," she snapped. He fell stiffly silent as she continued, in a voice marked by much more proper English . . . only with a faint lilt that seemed almost . . . Continental. "I should like to tend the flat in the duration of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Moriarty's illnesses, which I am certain will occupy much of Marie's usual time."

"You are an angel, Kat," Mrs. Hudson rejoined.

"Right, then," I chirped. " I suppose it's settled, Miss Ferrell. Off to sleep, then. Take Mrs. Hudson's bed, as it seems she'll be up all night tonight, and be up early to fix us breakfast."

"First, though, Miss Ferrell," Holmes, to my astonishment, called thickly from his room, "I should like to know where your Irish accent went, and when a French one replaced it. It is not the first time you and I have needed to discuss this . . . peculiarity."

She stiffened. "I . . ."

"Oh," Mrs. Hudson slipped into the conversation wearily, with a shrug, "Kat's mother was Irish, but her father is a Frenchman living in a little village called Neiully, near Paris. She's always oscillated from one accent to the other in certain decisive moods . . ."

"Aye," Sebastian injected hotly, fangs bared, "that's as much as there is to it, Mr. Holmes. I grow tired of your _constant_ interrogation of my fiancée—she has already apologized and admitted her mistake . . ."

"But who, pray," Irene shot back in a velvety-firm voice, hackles risen to Holmes's defense, "was the employer who planted the false charges against Mr. Holmes's person on you, Miss Ferrell?"

Holmes's eyes, keen even in the midst of pain and exhaustion, took in Katherine Ferrell's quaking little figure. Some modicum of pity must have fluttered inside him, for he yawned, "Oh, pooh. I grow tired of interrogations, just as much as you do, Colonel. You and your good lady have earned the evening free of my eagle eye. But be warned of my most decisive questioning in the morning."

"Of course, Mr. Holmes," Sebastian replied tightly, taking Miss Ferrell's arms in order to lead her downstairs.

But again, as in the Blue Raven Tavern months ago when our business together had begun, Kat bucked him off her and bristled, "I know where Marie's bedroom is, and I'd care to sleep there _alone_!"

He was blatantly injured by her callousness. "Kattie . . ."

"_No_," she echoed those same words, in that same heated tone as before, "I am _not _afraid!"

Then I was alone with the two pairs of lovers, the third pair having departed quarrelling down the stairs. For an instant a sharp pang of grief made me think on my late Mary, and miss her dreadfully. But I swallowed it down, wiping hands across my sagging face. I had too many charges tonight to let myself succumb to weakness. I dimmed the gaslights and pretended to retire to my room, even donned my dressing gown, but every fifteen minutes my anxiety stole me up to my bedroom door, and I'd peek out and glimpse Irene Adler still cradling Holmes, still murmuring chemistry theorems in his wilting, slumbering ear, and little did she know how rarely contended was the smile on his face. When he had finally drifted off to sleep, the diva leaned forward, her great sweeps of deep auburn hair veiling his pale marmalade face, and kissed his cheek. A tiny flourish of a broader grin came to his lips; I wondered if he were aware that the act came from the femme fatale, or whether he was confusing her in his dreams again with the late Elizabeth.

Or perhaps in such a dream world, he could be visited by both loves in one form.

Still Mrs. Hudson made her rounds by candlelight, wetting cold rags, laying them across Moriarty's forehead, stroking his face, kissing it, standing up and gingerly stretching her cramped back, wiping frizzed, disheveled gold hair from her eyes, then returning to her vigil with more conscientiousness than an orderly in a hospital ward. And far, far more compassion.

The criminal writhed under his flannel blankets as though endlessly pierced with invisible spearheads, head tossing fiercely, then, at intervals, fell deathly still, whimpering, moaning soft, incoherent streams of words. I have never so admired Mrs. Hudson before or since that night: For the entire time that I was awake, each time I peered out of my room, she was either cradling her lover's head in her arms or up seeking some item of his need. She looked like an exhausted angel.

Finally Moriarty stopped writhing, or stirring at all. My heart froze as I realized that this could only mean he was beyond either healing or worsening, and that nothing I could do, now, would change the path that his physiognomy had chosen to take. All I could do, for the landlady's sake, was pray.

The young widow silently understood this, drew up a stool next to the sofa on which the Professor lay, and dozed off in restless slumber, head dropped between her arms. One of her hands fell upon one of the clammy palms of Moriarty and stayed there. I almost could not bear to watch it.

I waited until her breathing shallowed before tiptoeing across the laboratory/study and towards the open door of Holmes's bedroom. Irene Adler had crawled into bed beside her brilliant but injured lover, the text from which she had read still drooping in her languidly slung-out hand; though she slept on top of his sheets, it was still an impropriety from which I would have died were she to awaken and catch me spotting her in the act. Like the game capturing the hunter, I should say—or Sebastian Moran would say, at least.

Then the chemistry book fell out of the femme fatale's hand and to the floor with a dull thump.

I all but leapt to the ceiling in alarm, but bit my tongue.

Holmes stirred, nestling into the diva, wincing at the pain of effortful movement. Drowsily, though coherently enough to avoid his stomach wound, she wrapped her liberated arms around his thin figure, ejected a soft, contented sigh, and fell back asleep.

I rested my hand on Holmes's forehead; it was sweat-caked, but cool. He was out of danger. I swallowed back a joyful sob, surprised at how frightened I had truly been for him.

This fully woke my friend; he looked up at me, and smiled sleepily, as only a long-time acquaintance can, with casual yet surpassing gratitude and understanding. He put his fingers to his lips and raised an eyebrow. Then he took my hand and squeezed it, once.

I understood the expression of thanks and of affection, but also the need to withdraw. I caught his eye first, nodding at the deathly pale and still Moriarty in the study.

My friend's drooping eyes followed my gaze and stared into the figure of his nemesis. He nodded, but never once looked back at me.

I chose this moment to finally relinquish my worries and get a few precious hours of sleep.

At last, as I departed, Holmes began to speak. But not to me.

"Come on, old boy," he confessed into the pitch black stillness between him and the feverish, delirious form of his dark self. "I admit it, alright? I can't pull _this_ one off without _you_. Now, _try_, damn you. Try."

Moriarty did not hear. He did not move. Did he even breathe?

I closed my door, collapsed into my bed, and went to sleep at 4 am, unconsciousness swallowing me while I prayed with more fervor than ever I had before.

Morning awoke Marie Hudson rudely, with too-brilliant orange-red fire. She buried her head deeper into the arm of the sofa, too exhausted, too afraid, of what horrible turn of events would ravage her next in waking.

But then something brushed her head, faintly—so gently that Mrs. Hudson was ready to dismiss it as the product of a slowly waning dream. But then it came again, the soft stroking through her hair, and she lifted her face from its cradle in her arms—and there across the couch, was Professor Moriarty gazing tenderly back at her. Awake. His fever was gone.

Though his eyes were barely open, framed by a pale and worn face, they were clear, and they held her—in them, in that instant, she was home. "Good morning," he croaked, a rare smile creeping up his lips. "Good morning to my favorite hostage."

Marie Hudson felt her arms, her frame, trembling uncontrollably. Between her teeth, and squinting from the blinding window light striking her face, she attempted to conceal her wrenching relief: "I wish you could see the sunrise. It is beautiful . . . I wish you could get up and see it." She laughed to hide a sob.

But Moriarty's penetrating gaze absorbed every inch of her. "Oh, I can see it _quite _well from here." Again his hand sought her hair, and she seized his fingers with both her fists and squeezed hard.

Then Mrs. Hudson felt her face betraying her, beginning to crumble. "Oh, James, does it hurt much?"

"All will be well now. I will mend." The Professor sighed, evading the question. His eyes lost his battle with fatigue and slid shut. "There, now, love. Please don't cry. You've already rescued me, you know."

She realized her own exhaustion now, the same she'd felt those nights pacing her empty house when freshly a widow. But this time her lover had returned—and she was overwhelmed with it. With a short, stifled cry, Marie Hudson fell forward into Professor Moriarty's arms. Unable to comfort her in his own weakness, he planted a frail kiss on her cheek—it was enough, however, for her. He was alive.

She paused halfway to the pantry, for there, leaned against the sink and near a bustling and cooking Kat, was Helen MacBain. Her fresh-scrubbed olive face was bright with readiness, her pale pink gossamer hair swept tightly out of her way into a mass of hairpins. "Kat sent for me early this morning. She told me about your peculiar guest, and what a handful he might be." Her eyebrows rose, and she pressed a finger to her lips, promising secrecy. "Mac and I have made our verdict and say he's reached a grace period—so long as he continues on his turn towards honorable treatment of you, my dearest Marie. So I'm here to help out."

"Oh, Kat, Helen, you are my saints!" Mrs. Hudson fell into her friends' arms, the joy of their support easily masking her bursting emotions. But then she spotted a third woman in her kitchen.

Twice as bedraggled and equally clutching onto relief stood Irene Adler. The opera star leaned against the stove, hands fiddling with the lace of her dress. She smiled warily at Marie, eyes already bloodshot from tears spent hours past. "Sherlock stood up and walked about this morning," she explained, and added with a little conspiratorial giggle, "to go to the chamber pot! I told him I was glad to see him well and he just . . . looked at me and rather crabbily demanded that I fetch him some coffee. Almost pulled down his trousers right in front of me! Imagine that, the deuced little bugger! But nonetheless, regardless of the 'heroic' aim of his efforts," here another laugh, " it's marvelous that—that he . . . he'll be _fine _now."

With this, Mrs. Hudson broke. She fell against the kitchen counter top sobbing. "God, oh, _God!"_ was all she could muster, covering her face.

Helen and Kat paused to gape at her in astonishment. "_Marie_?" they uttered in unison. For they had not seen their brave friend cry with such abandon since the funeral of her husband.

Of all of them, however, it was Irene who flew to Mrs. Hudson and braced her under her arms. "I know, my dear, I know. The waiting. The waiting for the solitude to evaporate like mist over the Thames, eh? For him to come back. I know. But he _did_ come back, didn't he? He _didn't_ leave you."

"Jim didn't come back," Marie Hudson gulped around her sobs. "My _husband_ didn't come back!"

Here came a small sob of empathy from Helen, who had known the uniquely wonderful James Hudson as well as a brother.

"But I am telling you, Marie," Irene pressed, "_that _man out there, sprawled on your couch—that man who _loves_ you as _ever_ I've seen a man love a woman, who crawled back to the land of the living for _you_—he _did_ come back. Marie, you are a lover_ above _a widow As am I. _Always_. Acknowledge him while he is still here to be acknowledged, and you'll have no regrets."

" . . . Yes. Yes, a miracle."

"Indeed, my dear. Indeed."

All of the ladies, save the still-ashamed Miss Ferrell, joined us upstairs in the laboratory/study; I was mildly puzzled, but not, somehow, displeased, to see a new ferocity of kinship between Mrs. Hudson and Irene Adler, whose arms were hooked airtight as they entered the room. Helen MacBain entered last, quietly approaching the reposing Moriarty. He stopped staring at his entering blond beloved long enough to squint at her female friend with an effort at recognition. Finally her identity registered in his mind, and the weary grimace of pain on his features temporarily yielded to a sheepish grin. "I never got to apologize in person for burning down your old engine factory," he croaked. "Permit me to do so now, Mrs. MacBain. I have never been a worse man than during the events of that . . . time, and your husband is a man more than worthy of my adulation . . ." His eyes closed again, against his will, with the draining effort of thought and voice. " . . . Oh . . . forgive my fatigued wits . . ."

Helen shook her pale pink head once, firmly, and knelt by her friend's lover. Gently she took his hand and squeezed it. "Dr. Moriarty, please spare your strength. You would make up for more than your past wrongdoings by continuing to make our Marie happier than we have seen her in five years. Get well for her."

"I think," he sighed in contented concession, speaking slowly and drowsily, "that I am alive today _only_ because of the enduring dream of spending life with Marie Hudson." Despite his weakness, he cast a meaningful look at the landlady from between bleary eyelids. "My life is hers, Mrs. MacBain. Should she tell me what I need do, it is as good as done. You see, I _love_ Marie . . . _very _much."

Mrs. Hudson's hand flew to her chest—her heart. Tears not yet fully spent dripped down her cheeks. "She knows," the widow breathed, of herself. "She always knew."

He smiled sadly. "But she deserved to be reassured of it _long_ ago. My love itself forbade what I thought would so hurt her. But I see I hurt her more by withdrawing the certainty of my affection from her knowledge."

"James," Mrs. Hudson gasped, grinning, but covering her face, which could no longer hide her ragged emotions. She gulped back another ungraceful sob. "James, my dearest, please just rest now . . . oh, Lord, oh God, what wonders . . ."

"My girl," he pressed, struggling to sit upright, reaching for her. "Look, I shall stand for you, if it will ease your mind! Please, I begged you not to cry for my sake . . ." He groaned and fell back, clutching his chest wound. Mrs. Hudson rushed to him and took his hand, and kissed it, and rather fiercely ordered him to do no such thing as move.

"They are joy-tears, Moriarty, you silly ass," Irene snapped: only partially irritated, for she was also smiling, and laughing. "Only joy-tears, which must be shed from time to time."

Helen nodded. So did I.

"Oh," Moriarty murmured, finally appeased when he saw a fellow male reaffirming a mysteriously feminine act. "I . . .see." He probably did not really see at all, but the fact that he surrendered his argument was to his credit.

"Professor!" Two boyish voices chorused, and in like a stampede of elephants trampled Todd and Smiley, and behind them, Sebastian Moran. When they reached their master, however, the lads hung painfully back, struggling to restrain their bursting happiness and relief. Moran, of course, dashed up to his best friend and all but tackle-hugged the Professor.

"Bobby, you idiot, you scared me out of my bloody _wits_!" he roared with laughter. "Do it again and _I'll kill you myself_!"

"Sorry, old chum. I assure you I didn't opt for such an event." Then Moriarty smiled drowsily at his two surrogate sons. "Boys," he chuckled, "it will be alright now. I promise." Then he opened his arms.

Todd balked, surprisingly shy, although the arc of his body made it plain that he wanted to embrace his employer. Instead he just stood there grinning, shrugging, gingerly patting his boss's arm. Smiley, of course, let out a wail of, "Oh, sir, oh Professor!" and flung himself all too roughly into Moriarty's arms. He hugged his adopted father back until the Professor had to cry out in pain to extricate himself.

"Sorry," the boy mumbled, pulling back. "Don't be mad, Boss, please don't . . ."

Moriarty laughed again between moans of soreness, and waved it off. "It's alright, my lad. It's all _fine_. I have you to thank for comforting me in my hour of distress."

Smiley blushed violently. "Oh, sir, it weren't but a matter of me holdin' ye down while Dr. Watson . . ."

"You were a very brave lad, Smiley," Moriarty pressed, through a yawn. " You too, Todd. You boys deserve a raise, that's for certain."

The two former pirates exchanged astonished looks before barking another cry of unison: "_Fine! Jolly good, sir!" _Then all four of them—Todd, Smiley, Moran, and Moriarty, like schoolboy conspirators, looked grinning at one another. They burst out into raucous laughter—excepting Moriarty, who only nodded his weary head, tired gray eyes twinkling. The mirth seemed to ease Mrs. Hudson's mind considerably.

I went to Holmes's bedroom spurred on by his impatient shouts for assistance. I acted as living crutch while bracing the detective. He hobbled to his old mentor's bedside and shrank to a seat on the footstool, face drawn in pain and soreness. Irene approached him from behind, hands resting upon and gently massaging his shoulders. Moriarty turned wearily to face him; as their eyes met, no measure of my imagination could have fabricated the relief and respect that passed between them.

Perhaps even a trace of past fondness, too.

"Honestly, Professor," my friend quipped, "must you constantly put on these life and death theatricals? Rather histrionic of you, old boy. You frightened Mrs. Hudson dreadfully." He grinned.

Moriarty gave his best attempt at smiling back. "Could say the same of you, you cocky ass," he grunted, with a gravelly chuckle. "Get the hell out of my light. You stink of formaldehyde and tobacco, as usual, and I can't even see out the window with you sitting there gawking at me."

"You can't see anyway, without your precious monocle."

"You still smell like unpleasant chemicals. And don't make cracks about my monocle, or I shall have to attack the integrity of _your_ beloved _pipe_."

"Alright, touché. Hum. I do say. Have I thanked you yet?"

"For what?"

"For taking a bullet to your gut in an attempt to save my life. You know. Catching a fever from it and nearly dying. Nothing big."

"Ah. Indeed. No worries, I heard your little confession. Oh, what was it? Something along the lines of 'I admit it, I need you to pull this one off, old boy, stick with me. _Try_, damn you!' My dear Sherlock, the very sound of _you_ _begging_ for _my help_ brought me _straight_ back from the dead." At last the old familiar fanged sneer surfaced on the professor's exhausted face. "Even when I' m comatose, lad, you can't escape my genius."

Holmes scowled. "Clever bird, aren't you?"

"What took you so long to catch on?"

The hours following the insurance of Holmes and Moriarty's well being passed quickly and calmly. We were all grateful for it.

At roughly noontime, Sebastian Moran let himself in through the open boarding house window, a sack of groceries for Mrs. Hudson's latest culinary efforts braced between his iron arms—perhaps it was a small token of appreciation for her devotion to his best friend, and even a smidgen of apology for his previous harsh judgments of her.

He deposited the fresh fruits and vegetables in the kitchen before sweeping Kat Ferrell into the landlady's bedroom for a private discussion. From the abrupt ebb and flow of sharp-toned voices heard all the way upstairs in Holmes's study, it was not a pleasant discussion, and it ended far from well, as she burst upstairs a good ten feet in front of her fiancé. He followed the stormy girl with lips so tightly bitten shut that they were turning white, and eyes so arctic that goosebumps rose along my forearms as he entered.

Kat would not turn behind her and grace him with notice; instead, she planted herself on the arm of the sofa on which Moriarty reposed and riveted her jade eyes on the detective into whose quarters she had barged. "I'm ready," she announced, as would a brassy guillotine victim whose neck was in the line of the cut. "Ask me anything, Mr. Holmes. I just dare you to think I'm afraid to answer!"

Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. MacBain exchanged stupefied expressions before swooping down upon their mutual female friend. She shrugged them off angrily. "NO! I am not afraid!"

"That's something of a mantra to you, is it not, Miss Ferrier?" Holmes curtly injected, while Mrs. Hudson retreated back to Professor Moriarty's side, and Helen found an awkward seat in the window.

"Perhaps," Kat hissed in return, and the detective smiled slyly at her inability to realize that he had called her by her dubious—and now proven—French name. "Now, can't we get this over with?"

"Can't we not do it at all?" Sebastian interrupted in his roaring, perfunctory army official's voice, employed only at the height of his annoyance with someone. He shoved his hands upon his hips and issued a warning glare at Holmes.

His fiancée put two fingers over her engagement ring, silently, a truly wounded expression on her face. Ready to remove it at any moment—and he knew it. He balked, and fell silent: yielding to her.

Holmes rolled his eyes at what I'm sure his calculating soul considered unnecessary melodrama. "Yes, well, not in the interests of solving the crimes that have thrown us all rather messily together, Colonel Moran. Now, Miss Ferrell. Explain your life."

She blinked, then scowled anxiously. "What?"

I sighed, shaking my head gently at my friend's unnerving tendency to strike dramatically at uncooperative clients. While it usually sufficiently humbled them, it also intimidated them into silence. It was always at this point that Holmes took for granted my soft-hearted tendency to console the client at hand, adding a human element to our formidable sleuthly duo. So I did my job. I took her hands. "It's alright, my dear. Do not be overwhelmed. Mr. Holmes only wishes that you describe your childhood history to him so that the current events have some sort of contextual sense."

Holmes grunted, nodding at me to signify approval and agreement.

"Careful, though, he's on your trail now," Irene breathed amusedly, equally mesmerized as her lover, although her supreme acting skills enabled her to execute her curiosity more subtly as she leaned over his shoulder and cupped her head in her hands. Only her gold-brown eyes, flickering like tiny flames, betrayed her keen excitement.

Moriarty chuckled, as though he knew my friend even better than I—indeed, considering their common past, it was possible— and expected his curt behavior. He wriggled into a semi-upright position on the sofa and pulled the flannel sheets higher on his body, half-dozing and half-listening as Mrs. Hudson stroked his forehead.

"What are you waiting for?" Holmes snapped then, in his prime state of dissection-craving. His wounds, formidable though they were, seemed forgotten next to his newfound fascination with Sebastian Moran's fiancée. "No time like the present."

Kat regarded him with a face flattened by distant memory. For once she seemed to entranced by her own thoughts to react defensively to his brusqueness. ". . . Me mother was Irish. She died . . . Lord, I don't know . . . many years ago. Wasn't long enough ago for me to forget the way me French father treated her while she lived . . ." Then she swallowed hard on something stuck in her throat, face crumpling like yellow-creamy wrapping paper. "Beat her . . . us . . . did other things to . . . overpower her . . . u-us . . ." Here the poor girl flushed with misplaced shame, extracting a strangely commiserating look of sorrow from the drowsy Moriarty. " . . . well, you understand what I mean . . . things that good old Paris thought were just fine as long as me parents were married, as long as me ma belonged to him. John Ferrier is his name: Yes, _he _still be alive, of course, the scum. Scum now, yes, I realize . . . too late to prevent getting you hurt, though. Mr. Holmes, and as irritatin' and rude as I find ye, sir, I am sorry for that." She gulped on her words, fighting childlike tears.

From the sofa, Mrs. Hudson looked to the detective and cleared her throat suggestively, prompting him.

"Enough," Holmes took her cue, cutting Kat's apology short—from anyone else it would seem curt, but from a man who always spoke in such a laconic manner, it was a real effort at compassion. "Don't get ahead of yourself. Let's finish about the past before you jump to the actions of the present."

"Very well, sir," she sniffed, resuming her tale. "To this day I wonder if me father didn't have a hand in me mum's death. He's a respected man in French society, of course: a Parisian barrister. Well, back in 1888, in the autumn of that year . . . h-he . . . " She swallowed back another sob and plunged ahead. " . . . He made friends with this queer Englishman, a total lunatic, I thought, who was always going out late and dancin' with the gypsies under the Notre Dame Cathedral and getting' dreadfully drunk on their pure spirits, and patronizin' the brothels: Stupid shaggy-haired, filthy, stinkin' ass, he'd then get all weepy the next mornin' and come to our cottage in Neuilley, and beg me father to forgive him like he were some sort of priest. 'Father, forgive me, I got the French disease, I got the syphilis, I touched whores o' Babylon last night!' he'd wail and weep, and of course me dad, sick abusive soul that he is, so good at making arguments and twistin' the truth in the courtroom, would just pretend the priest's role and tell the man that if he gave him alms for the poor, he'd be forgiven all his whorin' and drinkin'. You know what, it started becomin' a habit. You know _why_?" Her voice quivered on the final querulous syllables, which soared to a shuddering high note as though in an ill-tuned opera.

It made me turn to Irene Adler to regard her reactions—if not for my idle mental connection to opera, for my sudden recollection that she still was an unspoken suspect in the Ripper crimes. But indeed, she was the first to speak up and ask in an enticing, velvety whisper, "_Tell _us why, Kat, dearest."

"Because," Kat spilled forth, obliging, "that insane Englishman that kept comin' stumblin' to me father's doorstep was a new millionaire: His father had just died, leaving him a vast inheritance, and he had oodles of fresh gold to throw at my greedy dad's feet—if only correctly persuaded. I couldn't _believe_ it—not for _any _sum! The man even killed his _wife _because in his sick mind she only married him to bring him to sin, because she was 'just another whore', because 'all women were whores.' Why, Mr. Holmes, my God, you know, this English _demon_ shoved an _upholstering tool_ in that poor young bride's ear and cut out her _brains_ . . .!"

Moriarty and Holmes bolted upright simultaneously, casting each other the looks of twin predators with prey in sight. "An _upholstering_ tool?" they asked in unison.

Irene merely smiled like a cat ready to pounce. "Very curious," she purred.

"Why, yes," Kat affirmed, a look of puzzlement on her face. "That was the weapon he used."

"James Kelly was an upholsterer!" I cried out rather needlessly, but then again it is almost my unspoken job to utter the obvious and allow the remaining uncanny subtle observations to my ingenious cohort.

"And he was also a wife murderer," Holmes himself murmured, a darkness in his tone that was almost theatrical.

"Why, Sherlock," Irene spoke my wry thoughts aloud, "how macabre of you."

"How true, though, too," Moriarty croaked, in steadfast agreement.

"I don't remember his name," Kat half-wailed, and we could tell by her bewilderment that it was true. "Only that he frightened me! I'm sorry, father wouldn't let me associate much with his clients!"

"Quite alright, Miss Ferrier. We are getting somewhere now," the famed detective crowed, a new fire in his once-weary gray eyes. He punched his palm with his fist. "Do continue!"

"It got worse for me to tolerate that awful, insane man's presence in our household, even though I rarely ever saw or spoke to him, when my father discovered he was paying off huge sums to another Englishman to kill prostitutes."

"Where?" Holmes fired.

"In…in..here in England, I think, I don't rightly know!" She clutched her head and shuddered. "It was because he was in Paris with my father and couldn't kill them himself, he said! Oh, God, it was monstrous to hear!"

Mrs. Hudson went to her old school friend then; while Sebastian braced her shoulders, the landlady gently stroked her hair. Kat hiccupped and finally restrained herself. "I….I tried to get away any way I could: to be financially independent of me father. Ironically, Mr. Holmes, the first outlet was becoming a girl at the…the _maisons de tolerance—_the French brothels. I also sang in the absinthe bars on slow nights . . . and that's where I met my Sebastian. He brought me out of that world for good . . .brought me here. I discovered it were a year or so after he'd been engaged to be married to my long-estranged older sister Sabine Ferrier . . . and a feud of his with some army mates—English they were, not Irish—got her…v-violated . . .in the worst possible way, and then…and then killed." She glanced at her fiancé, who, jaw set tightly, was glaring in a mixture of fury and grief out the window. Then she continued. " I never knew Sadie—she left the house before I were born. But Sebastian realized he could give me what he never got to give her…respect, an honest job, a real life. He brought me back to England with him, met me up with the Professor over there…" Here the girl pointed at Moriarty, who smiled and saluted her back with an almost comical degree of cordiality. "And _he _got me connected with Elena Smith. And here I am, an honest hard workin' gal. And me last name…I changed it from Ferrier to Ferrell so me father couldn't track me down." She stopped at last, hands folded, contrite, suddenly, as a nun. Almost . . . evasively.

"Amen," Sebastian darkly interceded, as though to bitterly affirm the visual effect.

"Interesting," Holmes murmured, scratching his chin like The Thinker sculpture.

"Fascinating," Moriarty grunted, arching that legendary rakish right eyebrow.

"What?" Todd, Smiley and I gawked. My pen hung uselessly in the air over the foolscap with which I was supposed to take incisive notes.

Polly, Mrs. Hudson, Mrs. MacBain, and Ms. Adler laughed in unison.

I was distantly aware, from their little party of knowing mirth, of the biting truth that women always seem to understand more than the greater part of their male counterparts.

"And why did you attack me?" Holmes suddenly came back alive, feverish accusation in his eyes. "Why did you stab me in an attempt on my life?"

Moriarty hooted a quiet chuckle at his once-protégé's bluntness, and I cringed.

Kat Ferrell jumped in her seat, stunned. "I…h-h-he told me you were going to hurt Sebastian! And the Professor, and the boys, and that…that God would punish me like all the other whores if I didn't prevent you from killin' the men who'd given me a second chance!" She let out a shrieking sob then, almost too dramatic to seem real, although the tears torrenting down her cheeks now were real enough to convince all of us of her legitimacy.

"Kat," Sebastian remonstrated gently, taking her into his arms there, glowering hatefully at Holmes—and at his old friend, Moriarty—for putting the girl through such an ordeal. "Damn you two nosy asses, look what you've….oh, Kat, come, now, love, calm down. Why didn't you tell me your father had come to England and found you?"

"He _didn't!" _The bar singer wailed. "He keeps sendin' me telegrams and this Englishman in a mask keeps delivering them to me. An Englishman who reeks of …of…_fish _or something! And hardly ever talks, but sort of… stammers or some such thing. The last one told me that if I didn't do my duty to God by doffing you, sir, 'the messenger would find out, and it would result in grave consequences.' I don't know what messenger! Who knows what my father means? I see now how demented he and his rich crazy friend in Paris are!"

"_Fish_?" Mrs. Hudson suddenly breathed, interrupting, face going very pale. "Just l-like…" Her fingers flew to her face.

Moriarty glanced back at her, vague concern on his face, his weary attentions vying between her and the juicy mystery unraveling in the form of Kat.

"What do the masks look like, Kat?" Holmes asked, gentler this time, leaning forward with his chin cupped in his hands. But he was so engrossed in what she was saying that he too largely ignored Mrs. Hudson's exclamation.

"Dear," Irene interrupted on Mrs. Hudson's behalf. "I think Marie just said…"

"Not _now," _he snapped, cutting her short, turning back to Kat. The diva rose an eyebrow and stopped massaging his shoulders at once, and something in her demeanor resembled that of one of the regal, dangerous gilt-encrusted Byzantine emperors in the Hagia Sophia, only twice as formidable. Both calm and…icily fierce. She took a pacing stroll into the other room, returning shortly, slightly calmed but still ferocious. He did not even notice.

"A theater mask," Kat blurted. "Like a Shakespeare mask."

"Like the ones in the Reflecting Pond bookstore?" Holmes pursued. "The one the Baker Street Irregulars told me was bought only a week ago." He grinned at me, eyes glistening, and I wrote the information down in excited shorthand.

"Y-yes, actually," Kat mumbled, fidgeting with her handkerchief. "A lot like those."

"Hull-llo!" Holmes ejected happily. "Yet another James Stephen clue!"

Mrs. Hudson sighed and fell to silent irritation as well, glaring at the ceiling and shaking her head. Kat stood and silently left the room then, Sebastian following close at heel. They both looked like ghosts to me. I shuddered.

Polly strolled in circles about the room, not sure which of her female mistresses she was more willing to follow.

It was then, in this interlude between rigorous interviews conducted by the famous detective Holmes, that Moriarty found a reason to address the urchin responsible for saving his life the night before.

" . . . Miss Polly, might I have a word with you?"

The child froze mid-stride. She glanced at Mrs. Hudson, who was only softly smiling. Her trust fueled Polly with a modicum of confidence. " . . . Alright," she finally conceded, with a shrug. She turned towards the couch, but was soon slowed by hesitation.

"Come on, dear. It's quite safe." Moriarty lay in his contented reticence , patiently awaiting her approach. It was at times like this when I could most clearly see the signs and habits of his former profession—teaching—exhibited in his manner. He was calm, firm, clear, precise and gentle with his new charge all at once, expertly, as though it were natural to him to be all these disparate things at once. Considering his academic reputation before his life of crime—gaining his doctoral degree at the groundbreaking age of 21—it probably _was _an innate skill.

Now our once-adversary watched Polly edge hesitantly to the floor by the couch on which he lay; she hunkered down on the rug, her plucky charm just barely hiding the anxiety that his piercing scholar's eyes elicited. "Polly," he chuckled then, mingling the cordial with the authoritarian, "please, come sit on the sofa with me. I wouldn't bite you if I could."

The girl's warm chocolate eyes blinked and flicked consideringly between her squat on the floor and the more comfortable, yet more confining, piece of furniture. Silently she shook her head in a decisive gesture of "no." Rigidly, she sat glaring straight in front of her, at the back of the sofa, just over Moriarty's head.

The injured and half-sleepy Professor sighed and cast the honorary Baker Street Irregular a look both rueful and contemplative, as though he realized the task he was undertaking bore more obstacles than previously thought.

It was, of course, a typical miscalculation of his.

Holmes and I laughed together, exchanging knowing glances at the urchin's expected defiance, even in the face of a peace offering. My friend then leaned stiffly down over the girl, sandwiched between his stool and Moriarty's sofa, and murmured some encouraging words in her ear. She shriveled into herself a bit, but finally nodded. He sat up then, winked at Moriarty and myself, and bid Irene help him back to bed. With a lingering fondness, as if Polly reminded her of her own defiant youth in the American state of New Jersey, the opera star bent and ruffled Polly's lush blue locks, grinning at the child, before consorting with her detective lover—to serve as both his new partner in deduction and his human walking stick. She did both these things, of course—the teasing of Polly and the assistance of Holmes—with her usual fluid, regal grace.

I stayed behind; this was a détente that I had never expected: peace between a hardened criminal and a child. It had to be witnessed. If it succeeded, it meant there might be hope of goodness even for Moriarty.

The Professor's lips twisted to one side of his mouth in thought, as though he were tasting a lemon and his mouth had become licorice sticks. Finally he gauged further persuasion, even if merely hospitable, to be counterproductive. So he proceeded to speak of other things. "I realize that you and I haven't much of a pleasant history. Indeed, you have no reason whatsoever to help me, and yet, last night, you _did._"

"Was the right thing to do," she stoutly countered, tilting her snub nose high. "Doesn't matter if I like you or not."

Moriarty spared another chuckle, a rather croaking wheeze that could pass as a concession. "Fair enough. That I understand also. But I was wondering . . . I was wondering if there might be any chance that, in time . . . well, you see, Mrs. Hudson likes you very much. I care for her more than anything else in the world. I thought that, perhaps . . . if you were willing and . . . and comfortable with the idea . . ."

The girl cocked her head like a sapphire-feathered parakeet. "Yes? Spit it out, Professor!" she half-snapped, half-giggled. Wonder of wonders, he had somehow, with his earnest bumbling, managed to draw her out of her guarded shell. He truly _was_ a master of educational persuasion.

So, knowing that he had won her, Moriarty managed a broad grin, so charming that it made the girl unconsciously lean toward him, her chin plunking down on the couch's edge by his face. She reciprocated the grin as he resumed his words. "Sorry. I like children, but they make me nervous. You all have the most uncompromising intuition. I mean . . . you see right through the masks that we adults use to hide our motives. I have many masks, Polly, so you rather startle and . . . disrupt . . . my sense of confidence . . . Anyroad, ah, um, I wonder if I could pay you back by . . . by earning your _trust_ in me. By proving I'm not so bad and scary anymore. By helping you to get a real house and family, and by becoming your private tutor, since you have been out of school for several years."

Polly had been nodding in emphatic concession particularly regarding a new source of education, but then she drew sharply back into her rigid posture of before. "Family?" She glanced nervously back at me, and then . . . into Holmes's bedroom. "I already know who I want to be my daddy. But he never offers. He never even talks about it. He doesn't want to get close to anyone." Remarkable sorrow passed her face, sorrow I had only seen when she had first mentioned her deceased biological father, another pickpocket of whom she had nonetheless been quite proud. A man who had been taken by Consumption when the ten-year-old Polly was but seven.

The wounded criminal tried to remain noncommittal, following her gaze. It was no coincidence that Holmes had considered the Professor his greatest mentor in youth; Moriarty was also a master of deduction. "No, he doesn't. But it has nothing to do with you. Think of Ms. Adler—he loves her very much but has trouble risking the loss of someone for whom he so deeply cares. And that is . . . . that is _my_ fault, Polly, for something I did when he was barely older than you. I broke his trust. Now I hope to gain it back. And yours, too. So perhaps I . . . I can speak to him about the possibility of adopting you, sometime. Watson and I, that is."

Here his eyes snapped desperately upon me, and, smiling though somber, I nodded.

Mrs. MacBain let out a little tender, maternal noise from her perch in the window seat. "How very sweet," she cooed.

Mrs. Hudson, having silently listened and watched the transaction, now leaned down and silently pressed her face against her lover's bruised and cut brow, as though somehow she thought her touch, her caring, might baptize him, wash him free of his worst transgressions and the guilt that lingered long after he had been forgiven. He returned the nuzzling gesture, but his eyes never left Polly's face.

The innocent little urchin did not understand the tension and grief that passed among we adults upon the discussion—albeit without ever truly mentioning it—of Elizabeth's accidental murder by the Professor's hands. So she reacted with explosive joy, leaping across Moriarty's form and flinging her arms around his neck. He managed to stifle the cry of pain that the sudden forceful action evoked from his injured frame. "Oh, Professor Moriarty! That would be wonderful!" she half-shrieked, proceeding to embrace me next. "Oh, Dr. Watson, _wouldn't_ it be?"

"Of course it would, my dear," I chuckled, my laughter continuing long after she had fled the room giggling and flailing her arms like a drunken sparrow.

Thus rendered idle, I turned my silent gaze on Mrs. Hudson and her unlikely patient. Or perhaps, I mused, my stomach turning, her unlikely _lover_ . . . ?

Moriarty regressed to a startlingly feeble state on the couch; only then did I realize that he had once again borrowed clothing from among Holmes's attire—a perfect fit, of course, as cruel Irony had it—a plain starched white nightshirt. He was covered from the waist down in thick flannel blankets, his dagger ears wilting with fatigue, his eyes struggling to stay alert and awake, as his was an untrusting temperament. Mrs. Hudson perched on a chair by his head and fed him a bowl of beef broth and some sips from a brandy snifter. Occasional grunts and murmurs of disapproval from him, accompanied by surly furrowed brows, indicated that he was unused and uncomfortable with being so fully dependent on another creature—especially a young woman, who, by all decent breeding, it was dictated should be the recipient of such service. Expertly she hushed him, with a gentle smile or a hand resting on his shoulder, and he fell silent. At these intervals his eyes acquired a luster I had never before seen in the criminal, a soft yet brilliant glow, and he clasped her hand in his, and in that silent tenderness, I became more and more certain that the widow and the professor were very much in love.

Presently Moriarty groaned and turned his head from the soupspoon, chuckling. "My lady," he slurred sleepily, softened by the liquor, "you'll kindly stop feeding me your delicious cooking now, or I'm sure to burst. I'm not used to a square meal."

Mrs. Hudson gave a gentle laugh, setting the bowl and snifter on the end table. "You mean to tell me you've already forgotten the first meal I ever prepared for you? It was far larger than this meal, sir." Her voice was playful, acknowledging the absurdity of the circumstances she was describing: The time one year ago, when he had kidnapped her hoping to get back at Holmes once and for all . . . and had instead, by fate, opened his chest armor to Cupid's Arrow.

"What kind of question is that?" The Professor's eyes slid shut and he smiled. "Kidney pie, Madam."

She bent over him and whispered it, but I could hear, oh indeed, clear as day I could hear it: "Marie," she said. "Please, Marie is what you _must _call me."

Moriarty's lips parted infinitesimally. "Anything you want of me is yours . . . _Marie_."

A cold hand rested on my shoulder and I jumped. Sebastian, my oldest friend, had returned alone. He quieted me and looked anxiously into my eyes. "We're in it up to our necks now, old chap," he murmured. The look on his face made my skin crawl. It scintillated between the red-faced sputtering of a vengeful child resolved to fisticuffs, and the smug, feral preparatory crouch of a maneating tiger . "In it _deep_."

And yet . . .

I quite agreed with him.


End file.
